Keoghs A law firm that puts people first

Brand Development

Although primarily a digital project, Keoghs wanted to use the opportunity to develop the brand further and to bring in some much needed consistency to their marketing communications. We introduced a typeface that could be used for both online and offline collateral. We also looked at a fresh colour palette and a set of icons so that key areas of the business could have their own identity under the main umbrella brand colour blue. A pinstriped graphic pattern was also created from the letter ‘K’, this became a directional device for usage throughout the new website.

Office & Portrait Photography

Keoghs rely on using stock photography to illustrate a lot of their insight reports or news stories, but this obviously has its limitations when showcasing a key part of their business; the people. So, to bring more personality to the new website and to also put a face to some of Keoghs 1200+ staff members, we conducted a series of photography shoots across a number of office locations. We also produced portraits for 100 key staff to deliver a more cohesive style to the photography. The new website now feels more balanced and it still allows for use of stock imagery, when it’s needed, without compromising the integrity of the brand.

Wireframes

User stories are a key part of building websites, they enable the creative and digital teams to understand how the end user will interact with the content, they also help the client set important parameters to the build, so that it doesn’t become a never ending and costly project. Wireframes help to illustrate those journeys in a simplistic way, before the creatives add in all the content or brand assets. In terms of the Keoghs website, there were 8 claim types from their portfolio and 42 services within them. With this in mind, we had to ensure that the site was intuitive and easy-to-use, whilst retaining a balance between the art direction and content heavy pages.

Website Design

A mobile first approach to the designs ensured that the website was fully optimised for usage on all devices, initially working with a limited amount of space on smaller screens and working our way up to desktop browsers. Great user interface and easy navigation is key when producing any website, even more so with a site as large as this one. Small touches such as breadcrumb trails and sticky navigation menu ensures the end user never feels lost, no matter how many levels of content they need to navigate through.

Content Management

As part of our user story analysis we were able to break down the common tasks that the site users and administrators are likely to perform, we then broke these tasks down into logical blocks of functionality. That allowed us to maintain a clean and elegant back office whilst concentrating on the core tasks that need to be carried out on the site.

We also carefully considered the content relationships, and were able to tailor an intuitive, yet powerful tagging system to allow site administrators to create content relationships quickly and easily across many different types of content throughout the site.

Putting Keoghs in Control

We sought to address some critical usability issues Keoghs had with their old CMS. One of the major reasons for winning the pitch was the flexibility of our bespoke CMS offering: Absolute Control, compared to the market leading open source CMS solutions.

One of the major requirements was for the website to showcase more dynamic content that is relevant to the area you are in. This dynamic content relationship is established through a tagging system. The management of multi-type hierarchical articles is another highlight. There are various levels of front-end access, which grant user access to these articles based on the user permissions. The authorship of the articles may also be assigned to staff profiles, CMS users or even to a department. The Twitter feed is also configurable, it can show tweets based on hashtag and/or profile.