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How Coast created a straightforward, professional website for Wolf Safety Services, focusing on listening, clarity, usability and the simplest solution that worked.
A website that does what it needs to do
Wolf Safety Services came to me looking for a new website that would give the business a professional presence online and make it easier for potential customers to understand what they do.
My first job wasn't to start designing pages. It was to listen. I wanted to understand the business, who the website was for and what someone visiting it actually needed to know. That might sound like an obvious place to start, but it's surprisingly easy to jump straight into colours, fonts and layouts without really thinking about the problem you're trying to solve.
Once I understood what Wolf Safety Services needed, the answer was actually pretty straightforward. They didn't need a huge website packed with features. They needed a site that explained the business clearly, presented the services properly and made it easy for someone to take the next step. So that's what I built.
Keeping things simple
One of the things I try to do with every website I build is keep things as simple as possible.
Not basic. There's a difference.
A simple website can still look professional and do everything it needs to do. It just doesn't make people work harder than necessary to find what they're looking for.
That was particularly important here. Wolf Safety Services provides specialist services, but a potential customer shouldn't need to understand all the technical detail before they can work out whether Wolf can help them.
So I concentrated on getting the important information in the right places, making the navigation straightforward and giving the site a clear structure.
There was no point adding things just because they were available.
Thinking about the customer
I always try to look at a website from the customer's point of view.
When you're working on your own business, you know it inside out. You know the terminology, you know what your services mean and you know what you want people to see.
Your customers don't have that knowledge.
So while working on the Wolf Safety Services website, I kept coming back to a fairly simple question:
If I knew nothing about this business, would this make sense to me?
That helped shape the content and the way the information was presented.
It also meant thinking about the things people are likely to want to know before getting in touch, rather than simply putting everything the business had to say onto a webpage.
Wolf Safety Services website, built with Google Sites
The website needs to work on a phone too
These days, there's not much point having a website that looks good on a desktop but becomes awkward to use on a phone. So mobile was part of the job from the start rather than something to worry about at the end.
The layout, navigation, text and calls to action all needed to work on a much smaller screen, while still making the site easy to use. That's not particularly exciting to talk about, but it's the sort of thing that matters when you're actually using a website.
Working together rather than disappearing
I don't think building a website should be a case of handing everything over to a designer and hoping for the best. You know your business. I know websites. The useful bit happens when we put those two things together.
So rather than disappearing for weeks and coming back with a finished website, I like to work through things with the client, get feedback and make changes as we go. That means we can spot things that don't quite feel right and fix them before they become bigger problems. It also means the finished website feels like their website, rather than something that has simply been dropped on them.
The result
The finished Wolf Safety Services website gives the business a professional online presence and, more importantly, gives potential customers a much clearer idea of what Wolf does and how they can get in touch.
It's not trying to be clever. It doesn't need to be. It does the job it was built to do. And that's probably the best description of how I approach web design generally. I don't believe every business needs the biggest, most complicated website available. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest one.
My job is to listen to what you actually need, explain the options in plain English and help you work out what makes sense. And if I think you're about to spend money on something you don't need, I'll tell you.
That's the way I like to work
The Wolf Safety Services project is a good example of what I mean when I say “websites for people who just want it sorted.”
There's no need to make a website project more complicated than it needs to be. Listen to the client. Understand the business. Work out what the customer needs. Build the simplest thing that does the job properly. Then make sure it works.
That's pretty much it.
Need a website sorting?
You don't need to arrive with a detailed brief or know which platform you need.
Tell me what you're trying to achieve and we'll work it out from there.
No hard sell. No confusing sales pitch. Just a chat.
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