Everything that we build is responsive to screen size. We use a browser testing system called Browserstack to load up and simulate real-world devices.
Website Proposal
Timelapse
systems
SO Marketing
August 12, 2022
Introduction
A team of creative doers, digital natives, common sense approaches and strategic winners.
Whilst we work with many partners of all backgrounds it’s key to understand who you are going to work with and we always like to provide you with a short introduction to SO Marketing for any members of the team you may share this with, or do not know SO Marketing at all. Entering our 15th year, our business was formed on the basis of one key value, delivery of service. We employ all of our designers and developers in house (no outsourcing), encouraging them to think differently and push boundaries in design and technology thus enabling us to control the entire project process from start to finish. Really, we don’t see ourselves as a “web” company as we feel that doesn’t do justice to the knowledge that we have as a team – instead we are a full-service marketing agency with heavy web skills with over 2000 completed web projects over our lifespan.
Our team are all experts in their field, most of them award winning in their own rights with an average of 10 years commercial experience each, so we believe that we are very competent and able to advise clients accordingly. Our goal, with our website projects, is to create a blend of stunning visual design, practical usability and robust functionality to provide visitors with an exceptional user experience and increase bottom line results.
We engage each client using a documented set of policies, processes and procedures. Each client is assigned an account manager who acts as the primary point of contact for your organisation. This account manager guides the project team through the development process to ensure timely and high-quality completion, using tailored progress analysis.
Our approach also includes co-location of all team members to encourage collaboration. In addition, daily project status meetings are held. This transparency and daily review of progress mitigates risk and ensures that close management of the project occurs at every stage. Behind the scenes the account manager coordinates with the executive team to ensure service quality. We also utilise many technologies to manage our projects, for example, our internal CRM system which allows us to systematically manage complex projects over multiple services.
We are also a multi-award winning agency in our own right, over the last 5 years having won 25 industry awards for Best Design Agency, Best Web Design Agency, and various client services awards, as well as being featured on the top 100 of independent agencies in the UK. We are featured on The Drum recommends where our service level ratings can be compared against other agencies: recommendedagencies.com . Currently, the number one rated Agency in most services for over 2 years now! We also have a number of our case studies on there for previous work as well as in the portfolio on our website.
Locality
SO Marketing’s HQ is based in Leek, Staffordshire, just outside Stoke on Trent. This central position allows us to service many clients from across the country, we have a shared workspace office in London (The Metal Box factory SE1) that we use as we are typically in non-Covid times there once a week supporting our London clients, primarily Legal and General who are in the same building.
Despite today’s technology and even more so with the recent events we have experienced whereby digital meetings are now the new normal we still feel relationships need that personal visit, when permitted of course. Our offices are an extension of our team so we take great pride in our facilities, recently launching the new SO Marketing Academy which is our new education centre and training facility helping clients get the best out of their team, or budget.
We encourage all of our clients to at some point come and visit our facilities so you can see for yourselves the team, environment which they work in and most importantly the way in which as a family we apply our dynamic and proactive approach to all our clients work.
Your team
We think.
We clarify.
Then, we create.
James Aberley Senior Partner
Having 22 years of experience running web development projects and digital agencies, James runs the account management team and all business operations for the agency.
Being from a development background, experience with digital is second to none having worked on over 2000 website projects over the last two decades, seeing the evolution of technology and continually pushing the agency forwards with adopting the latest and greatest technology and methodologies.
Richard Latham Senior Partner
Richard has a marketing background, having worked prior to SO Marketing at a number of design agencies from Manchester to Stoke.
Richard is an expert at creative design and content production, leading a team of 4 full time designers who work on client projects internally. He also has for over 4 years been the primary facilitator for the Keele University work that we have done as an agency, and controlled the media library for this project as well as liaising with Keele staff to ensure successful delivery.
Michael Lamey Managing Director
Mike has been running and managing projects with SO Marketing for over 10 years and is qualified to Prince2.
Spending his time managing clients and their projects from proposal through to completion, he brings with him a wealth of experience in dealing with urgent requirements through to phased project release.
Jonathan Brady Creative Director
Jonathan has over twelve years commercial experience as a designer within the creative industry.
Starting out his career in a design for print role, he then moved onto focus his efforts into what he felt most passionate about, digital marketing and web design.
Jon’s role as Creative Director is heavily focused on the creative, working on the major projects for our clients. Jon also oversees all of the projects within the studio’s creative team, ensuring designs are delivered to the client on par with SO Marketing’s high award-winning reputation.
“Always keen to help and thorough in exploring ideas and requirements, SO Marketing has been a joy to work with through all aspects of the design & build of our new website."
Ian McNaught
Your Project
Conversions come from great relationships.
We want to help you build relationships with your clients, not just convert them.
Branding/Logo
We would assume that the branding elements will be provided at the commencement of the project and not require any work to change.
Platform Recommendation: WordPress
WordPress was first released in 2003. The community has grown considerably, and that growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down. WordPress is now the most dominant CMS on the market — standing head and shoulders above the competition with a good chunk of the market share, which means it’s very well supported too.
I have spent some time to outline some of the major reasons for WordPress, this is something we have over the years supported and some of the major points within our community are below, it’s broad in its overview but essentially it gives you some key points why WordPress is probably the most sustainable solution to go with right now also for future proofing.
WordPress is the Top Content Management System
According to W3techs, WordPress has 61.8% of the CMS market share — more than all other systems (eg, Drupal, Joomla) combined.
35% of the whole Internet is Powered by WordPress
Considering that the number of total active websites is estimated at over 1.3 billion according to a survey published by Netcraft, that means that around 455,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now, which means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use WordPress.
WordPress 5.8 Has Been Downloaded Over 7 Million Times
This figure is only for the latest version of WordPress, “Kirk.” Keep in mind that these are the download numbers, not the number of active WordPress websites, which doesn’t include download counts for the 36 previous versions of WordPress.
WordPress Sites Make Up 14.7% of the Top 100 Websites in the World
Some of the most successful companies in the world prefer WordPress as their CMS, including:, CNN, TechCrunch, People magazine, the NFL, Best Buy, and UPS. These are just a few of the Fortune 500 companies powered by WordPress.
Security on WordPress
Security within WordPress comes down to three elements:
- Minimising the number of third party plugins / softwares that are
added into the website - Keeping up to date with the security patches, software updates
and ensuring that this is done on a regular schedule - Additional hardening within the hosting environment to close any
loopholes from a potential hackers point of view
We handle all three of those as the fundamentals of our business and how we deal with WordPress, including having a very significant security checklist that brings in good practice from multiple different WordPress security consultants.
Responsiveness
Site framework
Home Page
Header / Banner Area (to support full screen image / video), Key service calls to action, footer. Menu items all to be managed via Wordpress menu functionality. Styled in drop down mega menus to allow site scope for growth in future. Clear proposition in the banner space to explain what the group does at one glance and to incite the user to move on to further pages. This would have the effect also of lowering the website bounce rate, keeping users on the website for longer. This section would also have direct links through to each of the internal key sections of the user journey. We need to position the home page so that the market is defined by it’s premium quality, but then enquiring and funneling to enquiry point is simple and easy to get to.
Service Page Layouts
Each key Service to have a page layout that appropriately shows off the service linking through directly to case study examples and also client testimonials. Suggest that we build out a Wordpress structure whereby Case studies and clients can be tagged to service which can then be pulled in automatically on these pages.
Our Work (Case Studies)
I would consider renaming our work to case studies, it’s a more mature phrase for what is demonstrating the work you do. Case studies will fall into an index page, which we recommend adding in some filtration to sort by location / sector. Also then the detail page of each case study.
Contact
Contact details by head office. Google interactive map plotting the location on a map. Integrated Hubspot Form function for lead capture
About Us /
Team
Redesigned Meet the team / about us section it could be worth consolidating it into fewer pages as accreditations is a bit of an empty page and could be brought into the primary about us section. Depending on how many team members you’re wanting to include or categorisation, we could do something like on here:
https://business.pearlanddean.com/contact/
News
Blog / News pages tend to fall into two layouts. The blog archive and the blog single page.
Site-wide Features
Any third party tracking codes such as Google Analytics. It’s worth re-looking at the hubspot Integration enquiry forms as right now they embed via a widget but we could create the forms in Wordpress, which then also lets us keep a backup of the lead gen, we can then also style the form more accurately to match the website, and then integrate the fields with Hubspot. We do this extensively for Legal and General on www.guildliving.co.uk and it gives us more design control.
Responsiveness
Everything that we build is responsive to screen size. It’s important to note that you have requested responsive improvements to target your majority mobile users which we will do as we go along with the build of the project. We use a browser testing system called Browserstack to load up and test on real-world devices in order to test how pages load and look across all of the most popular device sizes, operating systems and web browsers.
Workflow
We think.
We clarify.
Then, we create.
The website design project would follow a process as detailed below.
Workshop
Prior to commencing the project, we would organise a mini workshop call with yourselves, any key stakeholders you have, the project manager our side, and the lead designer on the project. This is the opportunity to meet each other, talk through design styles that you like / dont’ like and make sure that everyone is fully on the same page as regards what will be delivered and by when.
Due to the current UK situation, we would hold this over Zoom. We have done this recently with a number of other clients and this has worked well especially due to the screen sharing ability and this is an absolute requirement of starting the design / wireframing element of the project.
The objective goal for this phase as a result of the time taken to do the workshopping research is:
- To create one approved sitemap that defines the content requirements for both the public and secured sections of the website
- To turn the initial conversations and sitemap into the initial wireframe that focuses on the structure of the content not the design which will then be influenced in the second phase
- To firm up the database and integration side of the system design,
to detail where third party integrations will connect into the website, how they operate, what technologies they would use and to inform the client of any trade-offs and limitations for adopting a specific route - To confirm the browser compatibility of the suggested work
Project Risks and Mitigation
There are few risks associated with going through this process as the ultimate goal of it is to result in a more refined brief which ultimately saves time further in the process due to improved clarity on both sides. It does represent a block of time which a judgement could be made could be skipped over if speed and time was the key objective however for the purposes of making the end product exactly what you need, we feel it’s certainly worthwhile to invest the time to work on this stage together.
Design – First Proof
Homepage design – to make sure that we are along the right lines from a design point of view. Feedback to be provided by the client.
The way that websites are constructed within CMS platforms are on the basis of ‘Unique Page Layouts’. We define a unique layout as one page that looks and operates differently to another. The characteristics of each unique page layout include :
A layout that suits a specific content class. For example, a blog post page contains different content to a home page thus requires the design to be unique to that.
- Bespoke admin functionality to be able to edit and control that specific layout’s properties
- It’s own position in the site navigation structure as a cornerstone of the website content
- Ability to be re-used if necessary. For example a blog post page would be designed once but be used for all blog posts, an ‘About us’ page may suit specifically the about us content however in future if other content would lend itself to that layout, could be re-used then without always creating a new layout. We would initially work in a 1-2 week design sprint to generate the first set of design layouts. This would then be presented and discussed through and amendments could be made easily with that.
We would initially work in a 1-2 week design sprint to generate the first set of design layouts. This would then be presented and discussed through and amendments could be made easily with that. We use industry standard software Adobe XD for this purpose and this allows us to make wireframes operate as if they were a website by adding click through functionality so that the wireframes can be navigated as if they were an actual website to get a good feel for how the site would operate.
Design – Second Proof
Feedback implemented, other unique page layouts provided to client for feedback.
Design – Sign Off
Once the design phase is complete, we then move to the build phase where the developers would create a test site having worked through all of the build of the page layouts, migration in of content and this would be presented to the client for user acceptance testing.
Third Party Software Addons
A number of functional requirements of the project will require the use of third party ‘plugins’ and integrations into WordPress. The specific nature of these would be defined during the design process. We would evaluate the required and requested plugins in the following format, and inform you of any third party costs that that specific plugin may incur.
In general, we like to keep the amount of third party software in a website to a minimum for a variety of reasons, not least that it reduces complexity, and improves security to have less software added in. We aim to use less than 10 plugins across the board on all of our websites as we accept that things will grow and get added to over time.
website costs
This project is made up of several components, comprising the following;
- Management/consultation
- Project management
- Building unique page layouts to suit the site functionality as detailed in the sitemap
- Migrating all of the content provided into the website
- Setup of Analytics tracking
- Launch procedures
Development - The developer will be providing the following production elements;
- Creation of initial operating schedule, technical specifications and development plan
- HTML page construction and subsequent page builds
- Building custom admin panel to support the content and flexible page layouts where required
- Server preparation, hosting setup and transferring to test and live sites
Finally;
- Deployment to hosting arrangements as provided by client upon our recommendation
- We have costed the proposal at just over 100 hours of time to complete. If feedback on any particular phase pushes the time over this we would let you know and suggest ways to make that more efficient or give the option to add more time as required so not to go over budget as we need to stick to the budgeted amount.
- Costs do not include the cost of any third party Wordpress modules required which are passed on at cost, or we request you purchase them directly
Population/ migration
Wordpress Admin Training
- You will recevie training on the admin area of your site where we will teach you how to edit the content of your new site, following this you will be geared up to go away and populate the site using your own resources.
Migration/Population
- We do offer a content migration/population service which takes the burden of population out of the equation for you.
Ongoing costs + support
Bug Fixing and Maintenance
The primary goal of the website developers post-go live is to ensure that any bugs reported are addressed in a timely manner and are fully tested before deployment. At SO Marketing, we operate a ticketing system which handles support requests such as this from our clients. Our process works as follows:
Maintenance + Support options
SO Marketing offers a number of hosting and support options depending on customers requirements. *We only offer Web hosting services we do not offer any email related hosting, or forwarding services this falls under domain control or URL management which can be dealt with as a separate matter.
Wordpress Maintenance Updates
Maintenance Updates Only
This plan is essentially to carry out all maintenance on the sites admin as required, this will cover items such as plugin updates, security patch releases and any version upgrades (providing all connected plugins will work with the latest version). This also covers the plugins used within the site providing they are within supported themselves (That’s the third party creator to the plugin who still supports and updates the plugin) If the plugin no longer works or is no longer supported we will look to find a suitable replacement which does the same job.
Monthly Updates
WordPress Updates every month. We fix any issues these updates caused to the website platform
Plugins & Cost
Any licenses or subscriptions to any paid plugins will continue to be paid by the client directly or billed to the client at cost if any are used.
Out of scope tasks
Any needs out of the scope of regular maintenance charged at £100 per hour. Out of scope tasks are to be quoted before any work will be started.
Wordpress Maintenance Updates + Technical Support
All services highlighted in the Maintenance Updates Only Package are included along with the below.
Technical Support
Access to our technical support team by email to address any issues with the website ongoing, provide any additional advice and investigate new requests.
Technical Support
Access to our technical support team by email to address any issues with the website ongoing, provide any additional advice and investigate new requests.
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