Siren Films are an award-winning company creating training DVDs for the early years and education sector.
We met with the Siren team – whom are a lovely bunch of talented ladies – to discuss their website project; they wanted to update their website with a fresh new look, to make it easier for their customers to navigate and order their DVDs.
After a few meetings, we looked into their current website (below) setup and found it was built on WordPress and pieced together by a few web developers, using a lot of plugins.
For the new design we decided to strip it all back to basics, create a new theme, with simplified code, to make it easier for customers to navigate the shop, for Siren to manage the content, add new products, link products together for bulk orders and deals, and also reduce the weight of the website for performance.
In order to track the progress of the website project, for design stages, building of pages, new feature requests, we used a great online tool called Basecamp. This saved a lot of to-and-fro on emails and trying to find files, etc.
Design Process
We collaborated with designer Will Howe who presented the below design for the Homepage – the first section condenses the navigation and presents an auto-playing video clip.
The second section gives an overview of what service they provide in a nutshell, it then further breaks down into sections for their customer base, taking them to dedicated pages about what they can offer.
The e-Learning Zone is a new idea to allow customers to peruse videos on a trial basis, with a view to signing up on a monthly scheme.
Featured DVDs pulls in the latest offerings basic on what Siren selects in the back-end, the News combines their old news and reviews.
The footer area highlights the free brochure you can download and some quick links to the key areas of the website – this is available across the website.
The next step in the user journey would be the Library. DVDs offline are either in the Documentary or Observation series, based on a particular subject such as Exploratory Play, then each DVD had chapters within the disc.
In the Library, you can browse the DVDs by filtering by the series, age range, keywords, default search or simply perusing.
The e-Learning Zone takes you to the individual chapters, displayed as clips, and these can also be filtered, searched or browsed at the customers leisure.
Once selected, the user would be taken to the Product page which would present a more detailed breakdown of the product, including an overview of the contents, clips (chapters on the DVD) which you can also view as separate videos, quotes from customers, linked products relative to the current product and buying options. All of which Siren can choose to turn on/off in the back-end.
Currently most of the website is built, with new page designs for the Checkout area including the Cart, Account section which includes orders and change of details, About Us / generic template – all of which can be updated by Siren. We look forward to the website going live!
Caroline Hagan
Caroline brings over 15 years as a Designer and Developer; featured in .NET magazine, the only woman in the UK accredited for Google Mobile Sites. A business mentor with Enterprise Nation, STEM Ambassador and Google Women Techmaker Ambassador Previous client projects include Blackberry, FIAT, Clark Shoes and Sky.
