Nominet take a content first approach for the UK Domain redesign. Ridgeway worked with Nominet to design a new interactive and educational website for The UK Domain to become the go-to resource for SMEs searching for support on getting online and growing their business.
Over the past year, Ridgeway have been working with Nominet, the official registry for UK Domain Names, with the initiative of encouraging more people to get online and making the process as easy as possible for everyone.
Following a successful project where Nominet and Ridgeway created a longform infographic page for the ‘Get Online’ process, they appointed Ridgeway to design their next exciting project. This most recent project focuses on a refresh of theukdomain.uk, a website run by Nominet, which has been designed by Ridgeway and built by the Nominet in-house development team.
Their previous website placed domain searching as the core focus, with the blog content simply being a section of the website. Their objective was to reverse this, making the new website content first and placing all content at the centrepiece of the website, whilst using alternative call to actions to encourage domain searching throughout the site.
Nominet opted for a content first approach, to reposition The UK Domain website as the go-to educational resource for SMEs looking for help on getting online and growing their business. The client also wanted to turn the focus on increasing organic SEO, therefore taking this approach was deemed the best method to help achieve this.
Through the development of the designs, Ridgeway incorporated The UK Domain’s new brand which consists of six primary colours and circle shaped elements. The website components were heavily designed around the brand, including the use of all the colours for the standard call to actions, with different variations that the client can use. The circle shaped elements were used to create emphasis on icons, pictures, quotes, statistics, call to actions and more.
With the objective of increasing article style content including both short articles and longform content, reconstruction of the navigation and information architecture was crucial, to make content simple for the user to find. To achieve this, Ridgeway suggested a category based search, which allows the user to search for articles by selecting the category that it falls under. Each category is located in the sub heading menu under a drop-down list titled All Topics, which makes it clear for the user to find what they are searching for.
To improve the user experience, each page, was designed using an image tile layout to evenly display each article. The homepage also follows this layout which includes featured articles, videos, case studies and a range of call to actions throughout. This layout creates a streamline process, making a more seamless journey for the user from the homepage to finding useful content.
“Once again, Ridgeway really understood our brief and what we were trying to achieve. The team at Ridgeway were clearly excited about the project, giving us not only confidence in their ability to deliver but that excitement rubs off (useful when it’s a project you’ve been close to for a long time!). We were all thrilled with the final designs, including our internal developers – no mean feat,” expressed Peter Meinertzhagen, Head of Content, Nominet.
We are very pleased to have been part of Nominet’s journey to this content first approach for the UK Domain website and their initiative of encouraging more people to get online.
If you would like to find out more about how Ridgeway can help you, feel free to get in touch with the team.