Indeed, the seed of great solutions to the design conundrums of any business is a well thought-out, immaculately planned and precisely executed vision.

Enter the Design & Branding Directory. Produced by the folks at Desktop & Marketing magazines, it is THE handbook for perusing approaches that have worked for different brands across mediums for everything from mini start-ups to multi-national mega-giants.

It is bursting with case studies with problems (and solutions) just like yours by innovative creative service providers just like us, Design Industries.

On pages 44 and 45, we are proud to detail our digital solution for the soon-to-be-launched site, meemeep.com.

Sadly, each provider could only choose one case study to showcase. We’d love to show off more examples of our tailored web solutions from eCommerce to e-Newsletters that we’ve created for all sorts of retailers, start-ups, not-for-profits – big and small. To hear more, contact us.

Get The Design & Branding Directory for $15.95 through retailers or through Desktop Magazine.

Be platform agnostic, instead of joinin one brand’s cult: develop mobile adoptions that’ll work on any platform. Otherwise, unless you only want to target customers with an iPhone, you’ll have to build individually for Apple, Android, Windows and whichever O/S which come out – ballooning your expenditure.
Good looks and functionality must work alongside each other.  When you get these two right your online mobile enterprise activities can flourish.  Get it wrong and you’ll sabotage your customer base and repeat business.

Case in point: I recently tried to use an (outdated) Nokia to get onto the Qantas site to change a flight and with a lot of fiddling I could view my bookings but not change them on this mobile version. After wrangling to no avail, I was left a frustrated flyer rather than a frequent one.

Eight tips for developing mobile web:

Functionality, functionality, functionality.

Make your mobile web fully functional regardless of application.

Keep it quick and simple for users.

Forget fussy graphics.

The site needs to adapt its content depending on the capabilities of (or lack of) the device receiving it.

Sacrifice showing off for user convenience: such as bandwidth compression.

Make online payments easy and streamlined.

Use analytics and monitoring to make sure your mobile web remains strategic.

Like any web presence, link it to your CRM reporting.

Contact DI for your tailored web solutions including for mobile web

The Delivery

First and foremost, Design Industries made sure that the new website kept the look and feel of Baby Bunting’s well thought out brand image. Underneath the inviting pink and blue graphics, the Design Industries team modernised the online brand by focusing on improving and enhancing the website’s core functionality.

The team chose to build the new site around Magento, which is an incredibly powerful, fully integrated ecommerce system. The talented web developers customised Magento to meet Baby Bunting’s unique needs, identifying which combinations of features would provide the strongest ecommerce system for the growing company. The new website is fully integrated with powerful reporting tools, full SEO-friendly text, a payment gateway, and optimisation for the iPhone and other mobile devices.

But the team didn’t stop there. Baby Bunting was also given a complete content management system, making it easy for Baby Bunting employees to update site content and add, modify, and delete products as the company’s product offerings change over time. The site is also fully integrated with an e-newsletter system, making it easy to communicate with current and prospective customers.

Managers at Baby Bunting can access user-friendly reports on all the website statistics with a few simple clicks. This allows the company to analyse site visits and identify ways to improve the shopping experience both now and in the future. The flexibility and strong performance of the new site have ensured that Baby Bunting maintains a strong position in the competitive market for baby products.

Web solution built & powered with Magento

The Delivery

Design Industries, in conjunction with Melbourne based IT company RTG, led Villa Maria through a complete overhaul of its website, evaluating the organisation’s strengths, vision, desires and challenges.  Recognising that Villa Maria’s audience reacts positively to strong visuals, Design Industries designed a site with numerous images to highlight the activities and joy that Villa Maria brings to its stakeholders.  These photos were combined with a design and a colour palette that aligned with the corporate branding strategy to convey a professional vision and a consistent image.

Design Industries also devoted time and additional resources behind the scenes to develop a strong content management solution for the website.

The CMS integrates with the eCommerce system to provide a payment gateway for donations, which allows Villa Maria to easily organise and manage all donations and other income received online.

The final result for Villa Maria is a visually appealing website designed specifically for its target audience.  Design Industries provided the non-profit group with a cost-effective solution for enhancing its online presence, as well as strong functionality on the backend to help Villa Maria manage its day-to-day business.

Let us know what you think

You can visit their website here

FlexiCar approached Design Industries to assist with a seamless integration of their payment module from their main website into their Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)

The Delivery

After consultation with the prime stakeholders at FlexiCar, Design Industries developed a custom solution to their online payment problem. Design industries built a custom solution using the SecurePay Payment Gateway that integrated with the FlexiCar internal backend CRM and front end website. The solution took into account the safe processing and storage of sensitive personal Credit Card and Direct Entry information.

The solution enables FlexiCar to accept payments via their website and get real time authorisation, ensuring they receive payment and confirming that payment has been received for their fabulous cars and other online services.

The Delivery

The professional teams at Melbourne-based Design Industries tackled this large, ambitious project one step at a time, completely redesigning the site and reworking the underlying infrastructure. The talented and creative designers created an ultra-modern design that met all of CAMS’ requirements within the specified time period.
Meanwhile, developers used Sitecore, which is arguably the best content management system (CMS) available in the market today, to create a new, powerful, and flexible framework for the CAMS website.

The backend is based on fast, intuitive edging, which uses the same ribbon-style interface as Microsoft Office 2007, making the editing environment comfortable and intuitive for the end users – even for CAMS employees who have little or no experience in web-editing.

The web development work also accommodated multi-site deployment, meaning that CAMS can now manage an unlimited number of sites, sharing information and backend code across sites with ease. In addition, Design Industries focused on search-engine optimization (SEO), using Google-friendly URLs and other techniques to instantly improve the site’s organic search results.

All this work resulted in an exciting, compelling website that speaks directly to Australian motor sport enthusiasts. The state-of-the-art CMS supports a fully functional intranet and extranet, with many possibilities to accommodate and support ecommerce functions in the near future.

Web solution built & powered with Sitecore enterprise solution