Major Consulting Group

Major Consulting - homepage

Website: majorconsulting.co.nz (site has since been redesigned) - view screenshots

Size: 40-page WordPress website

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Shelley Major

Dates: April - December 2016, with ongoing support until December 2018

Categories: Scoping/pitching/quoting, Client liaison, Project manager, IA & UX, Website designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Responsive web design/dev, CSS-based layout, CSS3, HTML5, WordPress, Small sites

Brief: Major Consulting Group (MCG) is a Wellington-based health and safety consultancy working with clients across New Zealand and in Australia in a variety of sectors, making a difference to health, safety and organisational performance. They provide a range of assurance and safety culture audits as well as practical assistance, tailoring enduring health and safety business processes for their clients. I was recommended for this project by my good friend Kim Payton, who had recently started work at Major Consulting and could see that their website was in dire need of an update.

They asked me to quote for a responsive WordPress website, based on an existing WordPress theme in order to save time and keep the costs down. Shelley and I selected the theme together, based on their requirements, and I built, content-loaded and tested the website, selected all the photographic imagery from iStock, changed various aspects of the design, and organised webhosting. I also provided MCG staff with WordPress training and ongoing support.

Outstanding, thanks very much Ali. I appreciate the effort you have gone to, to make this look good - Shelley

The website is looking GREAT!! Sharp, like the photos, easy to read and make sense of - Jane

Shelley Major and Jane Lawrence, Major Consulting Group

Achievements:

  • Together with the client I selected a suitable WordPress theme and then, by tweaking the responsive design functionality and look & feel of the website I made it better
  • Provided my client with an easy-to manage responsive website, completely content-loaded and ready for launch, at a reasonable price.

My responsibilities included:

  • Writing the proposal for the website fixed-price contract
  • Project management and ongoing liaison with Shelley Major
  • Selecting a number of suitable WordPress themes and presenting these to Shelley for her consideration in order to keep the price down and achieve all the functionality we required for the website
  • Helping Shelley to identify her preferred theme, Function by WooThemes
  • Sorting out hosting for the site with my WordPress webhost, WPEngine
  • Making various changes to the design including font selection, colour palette, background graphics and other styling updates
  • Improving the responsive styling which I felt could be better at various device widths
  • Tweaking the design to incorporate Major Consulting's logo and some brand colours, as well as adjusting the size and style of various headings and sub-headings
  • Building the website and adding the content
  • Creating new page layouts for various sections of the website, incorporating a range of hand-built widgets, additional menus and other elements
  • Adding Google Maps to the website
  • Writing and/or editing the content for some of the page sections where the design required additional text
  • Liaising with Shelley to ensure that the page sections and content I was creating were appropriate
  • Selecting all the photographic images for the website from iStock and cropping these as appropriate
  • Creating other new graphics for the website, as required
  • Coding and testing the print stylesheet
  • Creating the favicon
  • Extensive browser testing of the site at all stages of the development process, across the following browsers and platforms:
    • PC: Chrome (latest), Firefox (latest), Internet Explorer IE8, IE9, IE10
    • Mac: Chrome (latest), Firefox (latest), Safari (latest)
  • Extensive device testing at all stages of the development process, across actual devices running the following operating systems, using Adobe Edge to speed up the process:
    • Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread)
    • Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
    • iPhone 4s
    • iPad 4
    • Windows Phone 7
    • Windows Phone 7.5
    • Windows Phone 8
    • BlackBerry OS 6.0
    • Firefox OS
  • Additional responsive testing:
    • Using Firefox to emulate different device widths - every pixel width tested from 0 to 1500px
    • Using Chrome to emulate a range of other hand-held devices, filling the gaps in my own device collection
  • Making a number of content updates across the website prior to go-live as Shelley refined the content
  • Editing, proof-reading and tidying up the site once the content had been added
  • Providing a CMS training course for Shelley and one of her MCG colleagues, so that they could edit the website themselves after launch
  • Carrying out the standard Google Webmaster tasks and adding Google Analytics to the site
  • Website launch, A record redirection and and post-launch testing
  • Ongoing website support for MCG staff as required.

Major Consulting website - responsive screens

It was fun working with Shelley on this website. The overall look is much more sophisticated than the original theme, and I'm really pleased with the photographic images I selected. I was looking for a combination of realistic (and aesthetically pleasing) and metaphorical, and I think my collection has added value to the site.

It's a cool, calm, elegant design - I really like it.

Once again I was using a WordPress theme that's new to me, within the familiar framework of a WooCommerce website, which I've used for other clients in the past.

The site was redesigned in 2019, with much reduced functionality and only a couple of pages of content, and the webmaster role was taken in-house.