Our background
Bigger Picture was born a digital design agency and has been ever since it was started in 2005. Everything we do from our studio in Hampshire is to make the web a better place for our clients and their audience. Our passion for web design and all things digital mean we only hire digitally focussed people - you won’t find any smoke and mirrors when it comes to our digital know-how. The agility and enthusiasm of our team mean we constantly evolve. Evolve our design systems, evolve our development methodologies and evolve our thinking to make our work better and better. We love it and our clients deserve it.
We love to design for screen
We let our work do the talking, not a fancy creative director that will talk you into accepting the blandest of design.
We’re all about creating experiences that will engage with the right audience, convert and ultimately help drive your business growth. We see the Bigger Picture.
Web is a platform of interaction. You navigate, you input, you engage. Digital design for screen opens up possibilities not possible on paper. We can animate, hover, click and be drawn into a journey that makes it possible to absorb a brand’s offering without needing to read a 100 page brochure. What’s not to love about that.
Thomson & Scott by Bigger Picture
Enter Our Web Design Process
Everything starts with a hello
Ok, sometimes it’s an invite to tender but luckily I don’t have to deal with that bit. Whilst I am bopping around on my stand up desk being creative, Simon (our MD) is the one that kicks things off. He’ll analyse existing data, understand your objectives and works with people to define the big picture. There’s normally a face-to-face meeting or two before we start our internal brainstorming and early ideation.
The Workshop
Whether you come along to our design studio in Hampshire or we pluck up the courage to jump on the tube (yuk), we sit down with you and your team to listen. For me, this is the most important step in the process. Understanding you, your business and your objectives - I can get under your company’s hood and figure out how to make your brand shine online. The workshop is normally attended by myself or another creative lead, Simon for strategy and perhaps another designer, developer, or project manager, depending on the type of digital project. We’ll collaborate to challenge ideas, find solutions and present early ideas to make sure everyone is on the same page. But most of all, we want to hear about what makes you, you. If it’s incredible products, a fantastic service or you make really great tea, we want to hear it. After we have filled our heads to the brim with your amazing brand, we head into the studio and brainstorm the hell out of our ideas, making sure we get it right for you. All our concepts come from real data, a planned user journey and of course your expert insight into your own brand and customer personas. We cover a lot in our workshops but it’s this collaborative and creative approach that makes us ‘get it’ and deliver something you and your audience will love.
The Web Design Concept
It all starts with an idea (or a hundred of them). Over a period of about a week our team of talented designers and creative developers will work on and refine a concept for your homepage – the most popular entry page to your site where we need to engage and show what you do, why you do it, and how you benefit your potential customer. Don’t expect us to just be playing around in photoshop and show a static design on a big piece of paper, for us that does not cut it in the modern world. I believe a web concept should be interactive, just like the final thing. We will deliver an animated and interactive website prototype to really explore the user experience of what we plan to deliver. A static JPEG will never do our design justice, so we don’t do it. There are times where high or low fidelity wireframes are used for the more complex website or application, but we find for most projects a design prototype in browser is the best place to start.
Hampshire Light, by Bigger Picture
The System
So, we’ve blown your minds with a home page prototype. You’ve bought in to our fantastic concept and can see things coming together, but that’s only one page. From here we begin to build a digital design system for your brand. How to use fonts, colours, animation, layouts, shape and imagery. It all comes together to form a system that we can use to build out the rest of your website, and we certainly do. There’s one more designer we haven’t talked about yet though, and that’s you. Keeping you in the loop and updating you on our progress, we build out each page-type for your approval and review things together every step of the way. We consider ourselves experts in digital design and web development but there is no greater expert in your business than you. You know what will work and what won’t – the process of designing a website is a collaboration, one we’re both proud to have designed.
The Development
I can’t talk about Bigger Picture without talking about our fantastic team of developers. Multi-award winning, and by far the best development team I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Our development team work tirelessly to bring our prototypes and design system to life using the cleanest, fastest and responsive code you could imagine.
Our creatives are constantly collaborating with our development team, solving problems and working towards creating the best website for your business. Our developers are involved from the very beginning and bring ideas to the table on how we can utilise technology to take your design even further for the best user experience.
From API integrations to complex and bespoke functionality, our development team can do it all. They’re super dedicated to speed and on-site search engine optimisation too, no other development team I have ever worked with share this enthusiasm for the web. It’s great for me as a designer and our customers see real life business benefits.
The Population
Once all of the development is fully tested and integrated, our team of designers jump back into full throttle to populate the entire site whilst carrying out further quality assurance. We collaborate with you to build out the agreed sitemap and ensure the right tone and messaging is carried forward throughout the site. We also give you working examples and design guides to help you understand how to best create pages yourself. We’re here to help and unlike a lot of agencies, love to take a hands on approach to website population.
The Testing
Although I’ve put this towards the end, we constantly test and feedback to our developers about how the site should work responsively and look for any bugs. Before going live we will carry out extensive, multi device and multi-browser testing to ensure that it looks the way we intended everywhere and for everyone. This doesn’t just include making sure it looks pretty though. We ensure every page is speed optimised and SEO friendly to give your new site the best start in life.
The Go Live
Your website is perfect. It’s looking and performing fantastically, you’re over the moon, we’re excited. Time to put our baby out there into the big wide world. Within a matter of hours the entire world will see your site as DNS changes propagate from server to server. Google will begin analysing your website and over a matter of weeks you will see the impact it’s making not just for SEO but on conversion and brand perception. We take care of Google Search Console, Analytics and any other software used to make sure things can be tracked and actioned for constant improvement.
The End?
It’s live, it’s out there… so is this where we split ways? And never see you again? We’re not good at breakups, so we don’t do them. Every relationship we have with our clients is an ongoing one. Learning from missed opportunities, finely tailoring your SEO and making data-lead improvements to your site over-time is part of our process. Creating a content strategy that works for you is important and will ensure continued performance over the life of your new website.
If you’d like to know more about our web design process, have a digital project you’d like to talk about, or just say hi, don’t be shy! Get in touch today for a free, no obligation chat at our Farmhouse in Hampshire.