About:Wool - the British Wool Marketing Board

Background

The British Wool Marketing Board (BWMB) is a Bradford-based farmer-run organisation, established in 1950 to operate a central marketing system for UK fleece wool. It has a membership base of almost 60,000 registered producers.

The Brief

With a substantial existing corporate web site serving its membership, the BWMB came to Message with a brief to design and develop a site on a much smaller scale that would be more accessible for both their retail audience as well as consumers.

The British Wool Marketing Board asked us to loosely base the visual design for the new site upon an existing 16 page A5 printed brochure.

Our Approach

We responded to their brief with a proposal explaining our design and development approach and supporting this with our business case. We outlined our planning process and the subsequent project stages that we go through all the way to delivery.

A key element of all our projects is the creation of a site map and wireframes, where necessary, prior to the visual design phase. These help us communicate the overall site structure, elements of high level functionality and, to some degree, how the content will be displayed on a page. The purpose is to make it easy for both the client to understand and our developers to be clear about what they have to implement.

Production and Implementation

Although initially the only fully-developed content available for the launch of the site was the Flooring section, we felt that it was more prudent to plan, and indeed build, the site to include the development of the other sections (such as Fashion, Etc and the Look Book). In this way, the site would be easily scaleable and therefore far more cost-effective for
the client longer term.

We chose to build the site using our content management system, SweetCMS, in its latest version 2.0. This makes updates to the site easy for either the client or us to carry out, and therefore again more cost-effective; very useful for something like the Press section which requires more frequent updating than other parts of the site.

Results

We have enhanced the British Wool Marketing Board's informative copy and striking imagery by using advanced Javascript animations. Information that wouldn't be immediately apparent to the average consumer is easy to find, including facts such as wool's inherent 'smartness' for use in carpet manufacture: sound proofing; great comfort; natural flame resistance and high durability qualities.