After months of planning, meetings, ideas and design & build, milk.co.uk, The Dairy Council’s new website has its launch.
Meticulous site plans and site functionality discussions reveal the extent of work in a website. After months and months of planning and much toing and froing the bare bones of the site had been set out and agreed upon. The core practice and raison d’etre of The Dairy Council was identified during this process to ensure that the website was working in synergy with the organisation itself. Identifying the key areas of services and business was essential to the planning of this site. Designing and building a website isn’t just making something look pretty, it’s about understanding what you are communicating, in order to produce the most efficient, elegant solution to that question. This site was going to be a monster requiring two distinct sides; a Health Care Professional side and a consumer facing side.
The Health Care Professional side would require secure registration, allowing access to HCP facilities and information, with the facility to order publications from The Dairy Council’s logistic centre. Stock levels and publication order quantities are easily managed in the backend. The ordering process allows for a complicated multi-point quantity distribution. Whiteboard animations are available for registered HCPs to view under the Video Presentations tab. The registration and login facility is a slick, side-sliding widget leading to the HCP site which reflects the consumer side; whilst still retaining its own identity and ensuring the users sense of place. The increased security of the HCP side of the site meant that existing registered professionals had to update their information when coming to the new site for the first time. This allowed the Dairy Council the opportunity to clean and refresh their extensive existing database.
On the consumer side, visitors are empowered by the range of great resources available at their fingertips. Resources on www.milk.co.uk hold the Information Standard, awarded to trustworthy and reliable sources of health information. It contains a new range of healthy recipes to kick start the new year which include milk, cheese and yogurt with useful fact sheets on milk and dairy intake for all age groups.
The largely pictorial homepages of both sides of the site are striking and full of impact, working in a multitude of responsive widths making the seamless transition from desktop to tablet to mobile, from landscape to portrait.