Case Studies: Small Business
Atlas Retail Consultants (ARC)
Atlas Retail Consultants (ARC) needed a website that reflected the wealth of their experience assisting some of the world’s largest retail names increase their sales. Three major elements on the website had to reinforce this:
- The home page needed to have dynamic imagery showing some of the ways in which Atlas have enhanced world brand-names.
- Every page on the site should be available from the navigation bar;
- Given the corporate nature of their clientèle, the site had to have a fairly conservative, “buttoned-down” look.
The first requirement immediately suggested some unobtrusive use of Flash animation. The animation cycles through layouts of shops that ARC has helped build.
The use of Flash, however, bumped against the second requirement: we couldn’t reliably create drop-down menus because Flash animations can overlay the drop-down choices. Accordingly sub-menu choices are viewed in the orange subnavigation bar, which in addition helps reinforce Atlas’s third requirement: the solid reliability of a tried & tested company.
PR & News Items: Why Use a CMS?
A further requirement for the website was the ability to place PR & news items easily and quickly on both the home page and then direct the visitor to the full content on a subsidiary page. Deploying a CMS for a project of this scale didn’t make sense, especially given that the only frequently-rotating content would be news items. Offering a CMS would complicate the project exponentially & bloat the budget several times its actual size. Argument from Design therefore created a simple solution for the inclusion of news items: a single page with the news teaser items which is dynamically included on the multiple locations (and with very different looks to boot). Atlas therefore need only concentrate on their content: they don’t have to worry about any layout decisions because they’ve already been made.
Special Events Contact Forms & Return-On-Investment
Finally, Argument from Design developed a simple, easy-to-reconfigure ‘Special Event’ contact form system that Atlas could re-use for their rolling series of events. We achieved the management of news items & specialised contact forms without the use of a CMS.
The solutions that Argument from Design have provided Atlas allow them to pursue their marketing goals with an almost immediate ROI—and with ongoing costs reduced to almost nil.
