observant needed a new web page design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 133 designs submitted by 34 freelance designers.
Observant
At Observant we are building a new generation of hardware and software tools to help organisations manage precious natural resources like water, energy, land and animals. We love simplicity, but know that the world can be complex. Our job is to help people deal with that. We take information from lots of remote places and make it accessible & useful.
The data we capture need to be presented to our audience in a compelling & visual way. Data visualisation is a big theme for us, and we need this to come across in our web site.
There are several key audiences we want to communicate with. Many of our visitors will be farmers, looking for solutions to help them more efficiently manage their water and land. Some visitors will be aware of our brand, but not know much about what we do. We want to give people a quick idea of the variety of solutions we offer, and entice them further in to the web site to get more details and make contact with us or one of our regional resellers.
We have solutions for agriculture, for dairy supply chain, we work with partners in waste water management and environmental monitoring . We want visitor to recognise themselves, or the solution they are after, and then click to learn more.
We need a new front page first and foremost.
Our current web site, http://observant.com.au/ does not pack enough punch on the landing.
The attached wireframe shows some early ideas we have worked on to that end. We need the front page to appeal to a wider audience, and talk more about what we do & the problems we solve in different industries.
We are not looking to redefine our branding, and the basic visual design of our branding and web site are great. We are not happy with the way the landing page communicates with visitors, and the are several structural elements that just don't work.
The front page redesign needs to deliver a much better sense of our overall portfolio, and be more focused around solutions and have strong calls to action. For a byline, we like "simple monitoring solutions to save water, money and time"
The current site has 4 main page types, and whilst those work reasonably well, navigation between them is poor. In particular the navigation "chrome" for the whole site does not work well, and is not up the standard of "elegant simplicity" that we're after.
Our current site uses Joomla and we'll likely stay with that. The successful design will need to be turned in to Joomla templates, but we'll handle that separately.
There should be plenty of assets that can be reused from the current web site.