Designing a new website for specialist online security provider LAWtrust was an interesting challenge for Flow Communications. The company is an exacting client with a complex set of products. It has to be – what it does is technical, and serious.
The products LAWtrust develops have three main objectives – verifying the identity of users; assuring confidentiality; and preventing breaches of security. When all of this is done well there is the added bonus of increased efficiencies in whichever business uses its products. To get an idea of the seriousness of the task, look at some of LAWtrust’s clients – they include the South African Revenue Service, the Department of Home Affairs and South Africa’s big banks.
After months of work, the website, which has an e-commerce component, is now fully operational.
“It is our first Craft Commerce CMS (content management system) website,” says Flow’s head of digital, Richard Frank. “It was great to use Craft Commerce; it gave us a lot of flexibility in the e-commerce approach.”
LAWtrust’s new online portal came just as the Protection of Personal Information Act – often referred to in legal and business circles as Popi – looks set to become operational. This is good news for LAWtrust, which helps entities do just that: protect clients’ personal information online (at the same time as it protects its own information online).
The Act puts the onus for the protection of individuals’ personal information on the businesses and other entities that deal with that personal information. Very soon everyone from a mom and pop store that just gathers clients’ details to a government department or a multinational corporation will need the kind of services LAWtrust delivers to keep safe information that is stored online.
Creating the website was also made more challenging by LAWtrust’s need to speak to two very different types of people – those who make business decisions but may not be fluent in “geek speak”, and those who are fluent in that particular business language.
That, says Richard, is the key difference between the old LAWtrust website and the new one.
The website was designed to address businesspeople such as CEOs and CFOs who know they need to secure information but don’t need to know the technical details, and also to provide the kind of information wanted by those who actually buy such software. To serve the last group there is a knowledge hub that delivers technical details.
“We spent a lot of time on the structure,” says Richard. “LAWtrust sells complex products. It was not as easy as it would have been if the products were easy to understand, like shoes.”
Still more time was spent on design, with a set of infographics and custom-designed icons coming out of the graphics team. This was done to create uniformity, and interest.
“It’s quite cool to see the icons on the website,” says Flow designer Mxolisi Gumbi. LAWtrust’s icons were the first he has designed for a website. “It was easy. I enjoy doing icons and illustrations; they are very trendy.”
As with almost anything, being good looking requires a framework on which to look good. In LAWtrust’s instance, this framework came from Flow strategist Janet Berger and designer Cynthia Mohlomi.
“Janet did a mind map for me, and I took it and converted it into digital form,” says Cynthia, who created the pages on which Mxolisi’s illustrations and icons appear. The mind map indicated how the pages would link to each other, creating a seamless and logical flow of information.
Cynthia says she enjoyed the challenge LAWtrust’s website posed. “The services are complex; and it was more corporate than I am used to.”