Straydog nominated for Awwwards

This past week, Vancouver’s Straydog Branding & Web Design studio launched Paladin Security’s new website. Today, we’re proud to announce we’ve been nominated for an Awwward for website design.

Awwwards recognizes and promotes the talent and effort of the best developers, designers and web agencies in the world. An international jury, made up of some of the most important designers, bloggers and Internet agencies, evaluates each site by means of a strict system of evaluation scoring them on a scale of 1 to 10 for their Design, Creativity, Usability and Content.

Paladin Security, Canada’s top security company came to Straydog in early 2012 with a motivation to fix the website’s SEO structure, its flow and to better showcase Paladin’s services. That notion grew however, when our branding experts at Straydog took a closer at their brand and website. Paladin is an innovative company with over 6,000 employees and they strive to continually be ahead of the curve, providing their customers and employees with exceptional service and security tools — their website did not reflect this.

Our strategy for the www.paladinsecurity.com Paladin Website was to go a step further, as branding experts we would offer far more than web design. It was critical in our minds to focus on their digital brand and align the web design and development as one.

The Digital Branding Involved

• Using Graphic Design to consistently apply their Brand Identity
• Reflecting a sense of innovation
• Designing a consistent UI (user interface)
• Developing a better UX (user experience)
• Applying a similar tone-of-voice to all website content
• Developing a photo style to be consistently applied in each page
• Integrating Social Media & Video as part of their Brand DNA

The Web Design Strategy

Our Brand Strategist Rob Barnett worked very closely with our lead web developer, devising a website strategy unlike anything else seen in the security industry.

Responsive

Responsive web design was the first consideration for the new site as it would give users a pleasant website experience and access to critical information whether they were on their Desktop computer, Laptop, Tablet or Smartphone. Being responsive aided in delivering a message of innovation and further emphasized the importance of their customers and employees to them.

Mega Menu

An important decision was information architecture, and how we would better showcase the content on the site. The first job was to organize the existing content and understand what new information would help tell their brand story. This would determine what would be primary and what would be secondary information. From there it was decided we would utilized a mega-menu for the navigation.

Mobile

Orientation and how the device is held or stationed became critically important in our design. We took a mobile first approach; starting small and progressively enhancing for larger devices and screens. Mobile devices force us to think differently about how we deliver web experiences. They present not only physical constraints in the form of smaller screens, touch enabled interfaces, lower band-width and smaller screens, but also practical constraints — We use mobile devices differently than desktop browsers. Mobile users are likely to be on the move, they’re after specific information, and they expect to interact with web pages in a certain way. With this knowledge we adjusted the Menu for mobile and scaled elements of the design so as to not overwhelm the mobile user.

CSS3

The next consideration was beautiful CSS. CSS3 allows us to push the boundaries of modern web design and for the Paladin design this meant; text-fade transitions, buttons, icons, typography, grids, floats, shadows and other subtle effects. As Rachelle designed subtle features and visual treats, Trent’s focus was using CSS to make it happen and ensure people using certain browsers did not get a second-class experience.

SEO

Search engine optimization was also on the list of must-have’s for the new Paladin website. We analyzed and fine-tuned the page speed and optimization with clean coding, image sprites, Drupal SEO modules and other necessary SEO steps.

The outcome was a cutting-edge website that we’re very proud of, but more importantly it resulted in a happy client!

Head over to Awwwards.com and VOTE for Paladin!

Learn More about Straydog’s Web Design Services [+]