Planning and Organization

Kicking off the project, we sat down for several planning calls with Pritt Entertainment Group to understand the client’s desired direction of the site. The goal, as is the case with most planning sessions, is to establish the following:

• Types of content on the site
• Who will be administering the website
• Types of users looking for content
• Design qualities and needs
• Brand guidelines

Once the above items are determined, we’re ready to push into actually building the site.

Design Conceptualization

The goals of PEG’s design were simple – to establish a clear identity based on the brand guidelines which allowed them to showcase their videography, and other, work. In doing so, we had our work cut out for us to discover how the leading websites were handling video content. We tracked down a few high performing websites and noticed something interesting – no one was putting video directly on the page. Instead, they were using play buttons with simple image backgrounds which, when clicked, would open a full-screen modal window containing the video.

We began to do research into the modal video design pattern and discovered by using this approach, we would save over 3 seconds of page load time per video. The target mark for modern websites is to load in under two seconds, so even a single video can push a site above that. Since PEG would be using multiple videos per page, we adopted this as the most robust model for moving forward.

Another critical design goal was to allow the users to quickly and easily find projects related to the industry or service in which they worked. Thus, we broke PEG’s work into two distinct categories – portfolio entries and case studies. Case studies would allow PEG to publish an in-depth analysis of projects with larger scopes while the portfolio would only provide brief overviews of smaller projects which could be used in quick sales pitches. And, by including filter tools for end users, they could quickly identify which projects applied to the services they were searching.

Content Development and Entry

By the time the website was ready for content entry, we had completed the content management system. As with all of our projects, we then took our time to provide documentation and training to PEG and its website administrators.

Utilizing this knowledge, PEG entered the site content on their own with little help from ourselves – saving thousands of dollars in entry costs. After the material was in place, we collaborated on a final round of quality checks on the site, and once validated, took the site live on PEG’s hosting in under thirty minutes.