Who created our new website?
Our keen employees suggested they would like to take the task on: so it has been developed in-house. The work was done by Lisa and James but our whole team contributed in some way. Lisa already enjoys coming up with new designs for our marketing in print and social media. You can find some of her previous work for G5 on our Facebook page. James has a background in website building (he is a bit of an expert!). He is always keen to share his knowledge so he was also enthusiastic about giving it a shot.
What did we do to create the new website?
Lisa: I am a bit old school so the first thing I did was sketch how I thought the website should look on some desk pad pages. This helped me visualise how it should look so that I could then work out how to make it react how we wanted it to.
James: We used WordPress as a platform as I have experience using it in the past. I gave Lisa a login and then let her loose on it with the knowledge she could ask for help at any point.
Lisa: I have a little bit of experience with using WordPress before but this was still a challenge. I spent a lot of time learning new ways of achieving the website we wanted. I also incorporated feedback from our customers and team into the re-design.
We hope you agree that it has a more modern, user friendly look: much more in line with how we are as a company.
How did we know what to do?
When our employees are keen to try something new we encourage them to give it a shot. It means that they learn something and gain confidence in their skills.
Lisa: I started to research website styles and how to achieve the right look. I used websites such as w3schools to help me learn about html coding and asked James for help when required. I tried to use widgets and plugins which we recommended or tested to make sure that users get the best out of the site. Pages like Google Developers were also really useful so that we could test how the page would perform on different devices and connections. As I was doing it alongside my everyday duties it took a few months to get it ready for testing. We then sent it out to all staff and some very helpful family and friends to see if they found it easy to use. Once we felt it was ready to go live we ran it through a mock live setup – to make sure it was all working perfectly before you could all see it.
