Portfolio

CSR - the Changing Needs of a Growing Brand

We go back a long way with CSR as they’ve been a Freshleaf client for over ten years. We’ve worked with the CSR team through every step of the company’s development from tech start-up to a leading player in the global semiconductor industry. In the ten years we’ve been working with CSR, we’ve supported them through four complete website rebuilds, as well as through several complicated mergers, unifying product libraries and branding throughout the website. When they came to us in 2010 to ask us to design their new website from scratch, it was a big undertaking, but also a great opportunity to rebuild from the ground up, starting with a brand new specification, and encompassing brand new messaging. Although other agencies were asked to pitch at this stage, our experience with CSR led to us being selected for the rebuild. As the company has grown from start-up to market-leader, the focus of the website has changed, with new content and new messaging needed to address new audiences - and the latest incarnation is no different. The new website needed to fulfill the needs of CSR both as a B2B company and as a consumer-facing brand, and had to strike a balance between a technical-focused and a consumer-focused style. Acting as the first point of contact for CSR's customers, internal audiences, investors, prospective clients and consumers, the new website contains a host of useful features. There’s a newsroom for the press, a dedicated investor relations area, and a support section tailored to the needs of CSR’s engineers - as well as an online catalogue of consumer product categories. Behind the scenes of the website itself, the site – and the company - had also grown to the point where full content management was required to keep on top of everything. In tandem with the work on the website, we developed a custom Content Management System for CSR with a wide range of different functionality, including administration for press releases and company vacancies, as well as management of content pages. Additional features included drag and drop page ordering, and a page ownership system which allows a large organisation like CSR to ensure that content is kept up to date by the relevant departments. In addition to needing a website, a company the size of CSR also needs a huge variety of visual collateral for a wide range of internal and external communications. As our relationship with CSR has evolved and our knowledge of the CSR voice grows, we have increasingly been asked to put our design skills to work in creating offline visuals and artwork, including everything from powerpoint templates and brochures to branding and trade stand artwork.

Linaro - Creating an Online Community Resource

Linaro™ is a Not For Profit organisation led by ARM and Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu operating system, in conjunction with a number of technology companies including IBM, Samsung and Texas Instruments. Set up to make embedded open-source development easier and faster, the organisation needed an online resource to act as its core; and because of our wide experience in creating accessible technology websites, Freshleaf was selected as a development partner. With the relatively tight timescales in mind, we worked closely with ARM to come up with a suitable design for the site. The key to the design was striking the right balance between presenting a level of 'tech' which would interest the development community, and keeping an accessible feel to appeal to a wider audience, including potential investors and sponsors. The wealth of technical information available at www.linaro.org speaks for itself so all we had to do was come up with a compelling design and a clean, clear layout for easy navigation of the site. Linaro is an open-source project so an open-source Content Management System was required, and drawing on our experience with various CMS, we recommended Silverstripe as a good fit for this project. After installing the system and converting our site designs into templates, we also customised Silverstripe so that it could fulfil all of Linaro’s functional requirements. One such requirement was to tailor the Silverstripe forum so that it would accept logins from engineers’ existing Open ID accounts – meaning that they could bring their profiles over from existing sites and not have to create a new account. Linaro was created to pool together the resources offered by the organisation's corporate sponsors to create an online community for open-source developers. It contains a broad range of interactive tools including a blog, forum, events feed, calendar subscription and a wide range of downloadable content and tools - all of which we had to take into consideration when designing the website. The longer visitors spend on the website contributing to the blogs, forums and discussions the more useful a resource it becomes, so key to its success was the creation of an engaging website tailored to the needs of the users to ensure engagement is easy and appealing.

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