Posts Tagged ‘website’

We fear change (and spiders)

June 10th, 2010

It’s not wrong to fear change. It’s a perfectly natural, evolutionarily-driven response.

But sometimes you have to embrace change. Like, when Westbury launches a brand-spanking-new website and Westblog site on the same day. Sure, everything’s new and different and you didn’t think there was anything wrong with the old sites, but you can’t stand in the way of progress.

The new main site – http://westbury-it.com – has been radically redesigned, from the bottom up, to more closely match our main marketing message – that we’re the vendor behind the operational reporting solution for HP Service Manager. We’re trying to keep things clear and simple, so the look and feel of the new site is also clean and spare, with some subtle gradients and limited use of bold color.

The Westblog site picks up where the main site left off, but with a few different touches to make it clear that you’re looking at a separate site.

The timing for the launch is no coincidence – we’re ramping up for the HP Software Universe 2010 show next week, and we’re hoping that many of the show’s attendees notice and take a look at the new site.

We’d love to know what you think about the redesign – let us know in the comments below or tweet us @westbury_it.

Tom

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Self Service Reporting!

April 20th, 2010

Working on our new web site really triggered me to focus hard on the benefits of SMI Suite, our reporting solution for HP Service Manager/ServiceCenter.

Our main goal with the new site is to make sure that the home page immediately makes clear what SMI Suite does and how it will help our customers. Result of three months of brainstorming and editing is the following intro block that will be prominent on our home page:

Westbury’s SMI suite is the self service reporting solution for HP Service Manager

Do you like it? Is it unambiguous?

The main benefit to extract from this sentence is “self service reporting”. SMI Suite will put the power of reporting in the hands of the power users, the ones really in need of the reports. With SMI suite there is no dependency on internal or external BI specialists, no need for technical, scripting knowledge or endless sessions explaining the reporting requirements to whoever will create them for you. SMI suite will do all the heavy lifting of extracting the data from the HP SM database for you and load it into our own SMI database. The Business Objects layer we created on top of our SMI DB will allow you  – by just dragging and dropping the objects  – to build your reports and distribute them to those who requested them.

Check out our Test Drive to experience the ease of use of SMI suite yourselves: http://westbury-it.com/solutions/service-management-intelligence-suite/smi-suite-test-drive

The new web site will be up before the HP Universe in Washington DC this June. This means that we will have several more brainstorm and editing sessions over the content and the layout of the web site. Although it will probably never be perfect, the main objective is to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and how it will help our customers. Once the web site has been launched I will definitely check with you all if we have accomplished this goal.

Floris

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Identifying good design

November 30th, 2009

I can’t remember if I’ve already mentioned it, but we’re doing somewhat of an overhaul of our marketing strategy here at Westbury, and at some point in the not too distant future we’ll be making some changes to the look and feel of our website.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at other people’s websites and trying to figure out what makes for good design. How do you tread the line between style and substance? Usability and aesthetics?

I thought I’d use the blog to share some of the sites that I’ve been most impressed with, and I’m hoping you’ll chip in with some comments and new suggestions.

General sites

thebestdesignsdotcomthebestdesigns.com is a great site all about great sites. Not only does it look great, but it’s functional and brings together examples of the best in web design currently out there.

I like the chocolate / blue color scheme for obvious reasons, but I also like the simplicity of their nav and the three column layout.

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thepostfamilydotcomthepostfamily.com is the website for some sort of creative agency (unsurprisingly, most of the sites listed on thebestdesigns.com belong to web design companies) and demonstrates two hot trends in web design right now; magazine layout and use of white space.

Some colleagues I polled hated the magazine layout, mainly – I think – because it seemed inappropriate for a B2B website to want to look like a magazine. So what about the best looking, but still very B2B sites?

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B2B Sites

fourfatherdotcomfourfather.com is a pleasure to look at. Clean, straightforward, uncluttered, pretty. Fourfather is a digital marketing agency, and this site is the perfect advertisement for their abilities.

But Westbury isn’t an agency, so we should probably be trying to achieve something different with our website. What about other companies operating in similar areas to Westbury? What do their sites look like?

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ITSM Sites

numarasoftwaredotcomnumarasoftware.com is nice to look at, but has some interesting functionality going on, all revolving around the flash-esque central panel which displays different pieces of information based on either what you say you’re interested in, or what you say your role is.

Unlike a lot of the other sites I’ve mentioned, Numara uses a lot of darker colors – and stands out as a result.

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So the question remains, which – if any – of these websites should be the inspiration for a future westbury-it.com makeover?

Tom

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