In order to design a successful digital product, we need to gain an understanding of the business environment and the marketing challenges our clients face. Just as important as the UX/UI, is the wider business landscape. How often does the content change? What technical skills do the content authors have? How simple or complex does the product need to be to achive its goals. We can only create a great product if we take into account this wider context.
Small venues often don't have the budget for a custom designed website. Long design and development cycles mean it can be months before a site is complete. The challenge was to build a digital product which met the goals of venue websites, but was considerably less expensive and quicker to deploy than a custom design.
Most small and medium venues share the same marketing goals and challenges. As such, their website should share common goals in terms of information architecture and content. Typical requirements are: A list of upcoming events, links to more info about the event, a featured event, some secondary marketing areas and some supporting pages.
Using the WordPress platform, a 'theme' was built to meet these marketing challenges. The theme's information architecture and layout are pre-configured, and the visual design is deliberately neutral. This approach allows us to create a pre-built site which can be quickly installed like any WordPress theme. Users upload their logo, add their content, and their site is up and running.
Users who want to customise the look and feel of the core design to align more closely with their brand can do so via the CSS file. Whilst it is possible to create more customisation options via the theme's configuration settings, this added functionality comes at a cost of a more complex product with issues of support and documentation.
Venue owners who see the advantages of an off-the-shelf, solution with minimal branding options, understand that this approach is a quick, cost-effective alternative to a creating an expensive custom site from scratch.
