Mint Digital

The Click #008

When we started Mint Digital, we wrote a manifesto - principles for creating effective websites.

Item 1 in our manifesto is ‘Focus your message’. A website needs to start with a simple, concrete message.

Here are 3 sites we’ve just launched. If you’ll excuse a moment of self-indulgence, we hope these demonstrate what we were driving at. (Future editions of The Click will examine how we lived up to the rest of our manifesto.)

Lovell Consulting
Lovell are capital allowance advisors. They save tax on property expenditure. Their consultants are dual-qualified in surveying and accountancy. They’ve never lost a client. If you own a big building, they’ll shave 20-30% off your costs. They’ve got big name clients.

All these are great selling lines, but none featured prominently on their previous site. The new site - makes all these points in an easy-to-absorb way. From a design point of view, the site conveys solidity, professionalism and attention to the details of buildings - just what you’d hope for from a firm in this sector.

The Nursery
The Nursery do qualitative research. In a field swept by fads, they concentrate on research groups. This consistent experience gives them great feel for groups and their reactions. Our problem was how to demonstrate this - lots of firms in their sector make similar claims, but with less to back them up.

We devoted a quarter of the home page to an article ‘How we generate useful research’. Each headline (e.g. ‘We hire drug abusers and bishops’ or ‘Never underestimate body language’) is something you’d only know if you had thought long and hard about how to conduct effective research groups. Each point is a tiny portion of their expertise - but it paints a bigger picture. Check out the new Nursery site.

Interactive KnowHow
Jemima Gibbons, MD of Interactive KnowHow, seems to know everyone in old/new media. She’s a classic ‘connector‘

With the new iKH site, we tightened up the corporate blurb and brought the lively events section to the forefront. What captured iKH’s essence is the ‘Friends of iKH’ section - each time you refresh it you see a different friend. A solid visualisation of the friendly, creative, supportive network that is at the heart of what iKH does.

Thanks for reading. Any thoughts about these sites, or anything else, much appreciated: andy@mintdigital.com.