Frieze Web Design : Portfolio

VODG - UK Disability Charities Umbrella Group

The VODG is a large UK based umbrella group for voluntary sector providers of social care services for adults with disabilities. Its 60 members help over a 1,000,000 disabled people throughout the UK.

As a redesign project, we felt information needed to be better organised and more easily accessed. Early feedback suggests we've been successful in this; unprompted, people have said how much easier they found the site to use.

As one of VODG's main aims was to increase membership, we created greater emphasis by including a detailed listing of existing members, the benefits to members, and an easy online application facility. News, regular blog posts and resources and were also included to encourage participation and repeat visits.

Visit: VODG Website

Wycliffe Bible Translators - Christian Education Charity

Wycliffe came to us needing a user-friendly, fully accessible website. As a large organisation, with projects operating all over the world, Wycliffe's old site was beginning to get unwieldy and struggling to cope.

This was a big project, with a great deal of information and media that needed to be carefully structured. To aid usability, three colour-coded main sections were created as the starting point for navigating the whole site. These colour-coded sections then continue with 2/3 sub menu levels.

To avoid the site looking dense and text heavy, pages were purposely kept fairly short, with a typographic style that's inviting and easy to read. Wycliffe's own beautiful images were used liberally to add that vital burst of energy and colour.

Visit: Wycliffe Website

Beauty Spot - Beauty Therapy Website

A local Beauty Therapy service needed a simple brochure, promotional website.

We developed the complete visual identity for this website, including a logo, etc. We felt it important to create a high-impact, unique visual style, to set it apart from the somewhat cliché look of its competitors. With the most important information instantly accessible from the homepage, we feel we've produced a website that is both user-friendly and contemporary in style.

Visit: Beauty Spot

FSG - Education & Preservation Charity

The Fortress Study Group is an international society concerned with the study of all aspects of military architecture and fortifications.

The FSG came to us needing their site redesigned. The existing site had over time become disorganised, and from a usability perspective, the site was difficult for the visitor to navigate their way around.

We suggested they use a Content Management System (CMS), to help with structure, consistency and easier overall general management for their new website. FSG also needed a password protected 'Members Area', and having a CMS would make that simpler to implement too.

Working from FSG's instructions, our approach to design was to reflect the serious academic nature of FSG's work, but also to make the site visually appealing and welcoming to the 'casual' visitor.

Visit: The Fortress Study Group

Church Street Nursery - London Based Nursery Website

Church Street Nursery, located in central London, has been given an OFSTED report rating of 'Outstanding'.

We wanted a design that was bright and colourful, to accentuate the nature of the website. Equally important though, was to make sure the site was practical and that the most important information about the Nursery was easily accessed and clear. This included the Nursery's location, using Google Maps, and the simple presentation of fee structures, term times, staff experience, etc.

The site includes a flexible Content Management System (CMS), allowing nursery staff to easily update their site whenever they wish.

Visit: Church Street Nursery

E100 Challenge - Christian Education Charity

E100 Challenge came to us via referral from one of our existing customer's. Their requirements were for a simple, 'informational' website, outlining an easy to use, structured Bible reading program. Most of the content would remain static, as they intended to use social media for news, feedback and discussion (no need for a CMS).

We designed the site to have a modern, spacious, minimalist feel, hoping visitors would find the style inviting and 'relaxed'. Design elements are big and bold, and texts big enough by default to be easy to read. A site wide style-sheet was created to ensure that any updates made, will automatically follow global formatting for overall consistency of appearance.

Visit: E100 Challenge

Beaker - Electronic Music Artist's Website

A small and simple website to showcase the music recordings of BEAKER. Social media is going to be main means to promote any kind of music, but it's important for artists to have an official 'home base' which they can control and grow.

We have a lot of experience working with web based video and audio, so producing a custom, branded audio player for the home page was straightforward enough. A short bio, contact info and an MP3 'download' page are also included.

Visit: Beaker Website

FlashSkins - Video Players, User Interface Design (UI)

FlashSkins, one of our sister websites, offers Flash/HTML5 based video players and player skins. Working demos and details of each player are displayed on a separate web page.

You'll find some nice examples of detailed and specific user interfaces (UI) we've designed here. So if you need help with producing interfaces for Web Apps for example, have a look at what we've done.

Visit: FlashSkins

Language Of Dance Centre - Arts & Education Charity

Language of Dance, a London based education charity, needed a website that not only offered detailed information of their unique educational services, but also a website with e-commerce facilities for selling PDF downloads, books and courses, and a paid Membership password protected area. Oh yes, and a forum, and a news engine ... Importantly, all this needed to be managed in-house by their own staff.

So this is what we built. A web-based content management system that allows LODC staff to edit and add pages, add products and manage their members area.

Visit: LODC Website

SevereME - Book Launch Promotion & Support Website

Emily Collingridge, a customer we'd worked with previously, came back to us when she needed a website to help promote the new book she'd just had published, about 'Severe ME'.

As with all our projects, we wanted the site to be clear, accessible, easy to read and easy to navigate through. But we also wanted a site that was bright and inviting, and thought a texture-like over layering style with a 'papery' feel, might work well and look a bit different.

The book's cover was used as the basis for the colour scheme, and incorporated into the Masthead and page background. Although quite a 'busy' design, care was taken to ensure navigation remained strong and clear, and that texts didn't appear too dense and 'crowding'.

Visit: SevereME Website

The Wycliffe Centre - Conference Centre

Located in rural Buckinghamshire and set in 23 acres of grounds, the Wycliffe Centre offers accommodation for up to 200 people and conference facilities for up to 160 people in a wide range of room sizes and styles.

Our approach, in terms of design style and layout, was to create a sister site to the Wycliffe Bible Translators website. Although simpler, with straight-forward navigation and a lot less information, we made sure we included design elements that made it obvious that the two websites were closely related.

Again, as with all our web design work, we concentrated on developing a site that is clean, clear, easy to navigate and easy to read. The result is a website where information is easy to find and digest.

Visit: The Wycliffe Centre

ETP - Language Education Programme

"It was so good, they came back wanting more". The 3rd of our 'Wycliffe' related websites. ETP is a specialist education programme for language acquisition, and is one of Wycliffe's suite of websites.

Having designed and developed the main Wycliffe website, we were asked to 'retrofit' the existing ETP website to look and function in a similar way.

The only issue to come up, with the redesign, was the existing ETP colour scheme. The highly saturated colours, it was felt, didn't really sit well with the seriousness of ETP's work. We did find a set of derived, complimentary interface colours that everyone was happy with though. We found that de-saturating and slightly colour shifting all the customer supplied 'masthead' images also helped.

Visit: ETP

RADICLE - London Based Support Charity Website

RADICLE contacted us wanting an easy to use, accessible, bright and friendly website, to detail the wide ranging support they offer to vulnerable people in London.

Their basic, pre-existing, red colour scheme was extended in the navigation menus and page headers to make the site inviting and simple to use. The strong contrast and text sizes used also make the site easy to read, and accessible by default.

We also provided a 'Content Management System' (CMS) which allows staff at RADICLE to completely manage their website in-house. This includes the ability to add pages, edit page text and images, add and reorder links, add date specific 'News' articles and sidebar 'boxouts'.

Visit: RADICLE Website

MPG - London Based Education Charity

The 'Maudsley Philosophy Group' is a London based educational charity set-up to "..improve the contact philosophy has with psychiatry and educate the public about the philosophical aspects of psychiatry".

With no existing website and little in the way of 'identity', MPG's only requirements were that the new site be simple, easy to use and minimalist in design. Minimalist design and development can be challenging but both we and MPG are very happy with the completed website (See Testimonials). The site includes a CMS allowing for easily maintained 'Latest News' and 'Events' sections. We also designed a custom Audio Player for playback of their recorded lectures and seminars.

Visit: Maudsley Philosophy Group

GetaWebsite - Understanding Basic Web Development

GetaWebsite is designed to help charities and others to gain a basic understanding of what it takes to get a website up and running. Includes information on site mapping, navigation, web technologies, hosting and SEO.

The idea was for the visual design to be bright and friendly, hoping to encourage people to read what is quite a text heavy website. The typographic style is also 'spacious' and clean, making the content seem less dense.

Visit: GetaWebsite

Hemihelp - Disability Charity Website - Fully Accessible

HemiHelp is the UK's leading charity for children and young people with hemiplegia and their families.

This website has over a 200 pages. Therefore usability was a major consideration and a well organised navigation (links) hierarchy was needed. A three tier system was implemented to allow 'visitors' to drill down to the level of detail they required. Also included was a 'quick links' panel to highlight special pages.

The front-end code design adheres fully to maximum accessibility requirements. Finally, the extremely flexible and robust Drupal content management system was installed and configured, allowing Hemihelp complete control of their website in-house.

Visit: HemiHelp

McDougall Trust - Educational Charity (Preview)

The McDougall Trust purposes are to advance knowledge of and to encourage the study of methods of election of and the selection and government of representative organisations whether national, civic, commercial, industrial or social. They also have a 'sister' site for their publication 'Representation'.

These simple, text-heavy based websites lacked any strong visual identity. We needed a way to add some colour for some impact. We thought some 'congenial' photographic elements might help, so we visited their library and took some shots. These were then integrated into the 'mastheads'.

Both these websites have a Content Management System (CMS) installed, allowing the McDougall Trust to update and maintain their website's themselves.

Visit: McDougall Trust Visit: Representation

Emotions Florist - Retail Brochure Website

This small, family run, florist required a basic 'brochure' style website to help promote their business. We felt the nature of the business required a website that was strong visually. A strong, vibrant colour scheme. We opted for a narrow colour palette though, so as not to cause distraction from the flowers themselves.

We also wanted to give site a contemporary, spacious feel. A more modern look than their immediate competitors. The site needed to be easy to navigate, with a minimal amount of text. Ensuring all the essential information could be quickly accessed.

Visit: Emotions Florist