When it comes to having dinner with The British Deputy High Commissioner of Singapore, you really can’t afford to keep him waiting, so when we were handed the job of building the new Manchester Business Club website within 4 days, we felt that it could be more than our reputation that was on the line. Here at KMP Digitata however, we like a challenge, so although the odds were stacked like a Ferrero Rocher pyramid, we once again pulled through.
The Manchester Business Club is a partnership between Manchester Airport and MIDAS, the Manchester Investment and Development Agency, and aims to bring together an exclusive network of businesses and individuals who have, or aspire to have, strong links between Manchester and Singapore and the wider area of South East Asia. Commencing with the launch in Singapore the Manchester Business Club will aim to hold an event a year in each of 5 key locations,
in addition to a number of small functions, with the goal of forging strong relationships between Manchester and the Far East.
The Manchester Business Club website had to reflect this message, not only in design, but also in build, a tough task in any agency’s book when from brief to delivery you have 7 working days!
Design & Build
Luckily we had the benefit of an existing brand and collateral, to base our creative treatment on courtesy of brochures produced by Creative Lynx. A photo shoot jaunt to Singapore would have made a severe dent in our delivery time not to mention the overall cost of the project. Using a different dynamic image in the background helps the site to look fresh and interesting throughout. The partner logos being fixed to the bottom of the browser means that the direct brand association between the event and its partners is retained.
It would have been easy to produce a “cut and shut” job that delivered a message but left little scope for future development, but this is not our style, and after all we have reputation to uphold. So we built the site using HTML5 markup which guaranteed its future proofing and allowed us to flex our front end development muscles a little. To complement the HTML5 we also added some ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles which ensured added accessibility for users.
Dinner Time
So with the website complete, looking good, working well, it was delivered in time for dinner. However, this is just the starter, with more to come for the main and desert in the coming weeks. We’ll keep you posted.
