Malcolm McKeon Yacht Design

Yacht design

It was time for a website that reflected the luxury and quality of their work. Yacht designer Angus Blair tells us how he achieved this using the Sketchanet platform. Check out the site at www.mmyd.uk

"As a yacht designer, everything I do demands attention to detail, and I'm a stickler for precision. I was tasked with bringing the company's online presence right up to date, with a website that could really show off the work we do. Although I have an eye for detail, I didn't know a lot about websites, and even less about how to design and build one. On top of this, we didn't really know what we wanted  the site to be yet - much of what we do evolves over time and so ideally the website would too.
Using Sketchanet, I was able to start putting some images and text onto the page, and experiment with various arrangements to see how it looked. You can create pretty much any arrangement of a grid that you want, and each bit of the grid can be given your own colour scheme and graphics. Once I had got my head around the basics, it was actually pretty easy to create page layouts. I used a lot of image carousels in our site - this turns out to be quite a neat navigational feature, not just for image galleries. The best part about the platform is the way you can just keep refining things. As it isn't template based, you don't get stuck with a page that doesn't work for the amount of content you have - you can just modify the page layout to suit. Since we launched the site we have made some significant changes - because of the 'preview' feature you can do all of that in private and only publish the changes to the public site when you are sure everything is perfect.

As it happens my wife has just set up a business so I was able to create a clone of the company site and adapt it for my wife's business (www.sea-stuff.uk). Big time saver!"

View the site at www.mmyd.uk

THE INGENIUM ACADEMY

 International school for music

As a new venture, the Ingenium Academy had to test and adapt their business to see what worked best. It was vital that they also had the flexibility to adapt their website accordingly to fit in with their approach and marketing.

Getting their website in front of as many prospective customers as possible was vital for startup The Ingenium Academy, who provide a summer music school for international teenagers. This process - which is generally refered to as SEO (or Search Engine Optimsation) - covers lots of activities both on and offsite. Initially they worked with a third party digital marketing company to drive traffic to the site via paid ads. Using tracking (easily added to any Sketchanet site) they were able to analyse the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, and also how well the website engaged visitors once they reached the site. By experimenting with their site layout and content they could measure the effect on both traffic and the conversion ratio of visitors. The flexibility of the Sketchanet platform made this all possible without the need for any coding knowledge or web developer, which crucially allowed them to keep costs low during their early stages as a business and beyond.

View the site at www.ingeniumacademy.com