Purpose-driven work is always heart-warming to do, so we rolled up our sleeves with real gusto when we were commissioned by global advisory firm Value for Women to design and implement its new website.
The mission of Value for Women is to promote women’s participation and leadership in business, finance and investment. To mark its 10th birthday, the firm wanted a new website that would reflect its ethos and, particularly, its focus on inclusivity in emerging markets.
Website for women
Value for Women wanted a website that would immediately and clearly show visitors the value it offers while reflecting its intellectual leadership in the global inclusivity sector and allowing visitors to engage with the company in a variety of ways. Hence, the website needed to be user-friendly and have strong visual appeal.
The company also wanted to be able to present its website in English and Spanish, and to provide full integration with Google Analytics and Mailchimp email marketing software.
At Flow a project like this is approached holistically, with the design informing the coding and vice versa.
We built the site using the latest version of the Craft content management system (CMS). Craft is easy for clients to use when maintaining their website and adding to it once our work is done. To this end, we created a “page builder” that gives Value for Women the power to build its own new, customised pages.
One of the more delightful aspects of the website is an isotope – or filterable, animated grid – that is used on the team page.
We got to work.
Holistic approach
Flow doesn’t design template-based websites. We build them up from the ground to meet the specific requirements of each client.
In the case of Value for Women, we used the basic structure from the original website but simplified it and improved the user experience, commonly known as UX, and the user interface (UI) – all the little extras that make the experience of using a website a pleasure.
We designed the look and feel of the website to be clean, airy, minimalist and modern, with a feel of space. The website elements merge easily through the use of layers and curves to link sections.
Value for Women’s corporate identity colours were fun to work with. We used them and a light font style to bring freshness to the website, along with varying font sizes to denote content hierarchy.
Sliders and banners were used to highlight the firm’s case studies and its Gender Smart Nexus, a digital platform that offers tools to help organisations improve their business outcomes and social impact by advancing gender inclusion in practice.
We designed and built an easy-to-use main navigation system and a resources search filter with icons to highlight featured topics.
Simple, elegant, coherent
“Working on the Value for Women website has been a great experience. The brief was to create a website that is simple, easy to navigate, and easy to search, filter and download resources, and I think this website does just that. It’s simple, elegant and coherent,” says Flow project manager Avril Naidoo.