This month LMD launched a brand new ‘Bespoke’ WordPress website for a brand new yachting company based in Hong Kong; Blue Water International.
The brief was simple – a single page site for the year of 2017 only, to promote the key services and best show the gorgeous yachts on multiple devices… oh, and to deliver live in 5 days!
Having just five days to go from an introductory Skype meeting to full scale delivery is something normal agencies veer away from. All the overhead and red tape that comes with a standard agency setup in this case simply wouldn’t have worked for Blue Water International. This partner needed an elegant yet functional website design and layout to display some of their beautiful yachts for charter and for sale. The site had to be responsive, show contact information and all the key service information on, all ideally a single page. Of course the site needed to be on brand too – a brand new brand – and all run under a new Hong Kong (.hk) domain which are notoriously tricky to arrange.
This is where LMD excels. Our lightweight agile and lean framework allows flexibility and cuts out unnecessary steps like wireframes and flat designs – all very traditional of a standard web agency. Instead we prototype directly in the system we later intend to tweak and push live. Minimal waste, maximum time and resource saving. We like working under the pressure of a tight deadline and we like being empowered to help out where a partner simply doesn’t have the immediate knowledge or resource to deal with things like domain purchasing. We also really like having the creative license to come up with some layout ideas for content. This eventuates in design concepts.
Concept Ideas to Reality
We always like to offer two concept ideas on new build or rebuild projects. The BWI site was no exception. Having all the raw assets – the images and copy – to hand from the offset was a real bonus, as we could play with these and have available quickly two very different concepts.
We decided one concept should be more classic and formulaic in layout, and the other more daring. As we often find, the chosen concept is normally a blend of styles from both concepts and this is exactly what happened on this build too. We like this stage very much as it’s when the creative juices flow that the real fun begins.
We are delighted with the speed and quality of the end result. The solid, clear and frequent communication throughout was the key to the success of this project.
This project goes to prove that you really can go from an initial enquiry to a completed project released to the world in under a week. The key ingredients being that the content is mostly already available, people are mostly available, and that there is willing to work in a lean and agile way. Above all – trust; trust that the partner will keep up their end of the bargain and trust that LMD can make it all happen just like they said they would.
We wish all at Blue Water International every success in their new Hong Kong based venture in 2017.
