Here’s another site that’s just gone live.
Sci-Tek Systems sells, installs, tests and services medical refrigerators.
These are the kind of fridges and freezers used by hospitals, pharmacies and pathology centres to store blood, vaccines and the like. They’re based in Wollongong and service pretty much all of NSW and ACT.
As always, I spent a bit of time understanding the business, scoping my client’s competitors, Googling for likely search terms and generally surveying the medical and pharmaceutical refrigeration market. As you do.
Even though it’s usually my client’s responsibility to provide the content, as it was in this case, I do the research because I’m the one who’s going to be presenting it, so I’d better understand it.
I’m also scared to hell that I’ll get stuff wrong. But then I’m also always pleasantly surprised by how interesting any line of business is. It all works out OK.
In this case, my client had some specific aims based on his own market research and that very much informed the basic structure.
I should say re-structure, as there was already a website in operation.
Apart from being a bit dated in its looks, and failing to cope with modern wide screens, the main issue with the old site was that it buried the items the client wanted to emphasise: the products themselves.
I was a little surprised, then, that my client opted to remove the prominent photo of a big three door blood fridge I had set on the home page and replace it with his phone number. He has a logic to it, which he explained, and he’s the boss.
As my client’s web hosting account didn’t include MySQL, among other things, this would be a static site. So I decided to make my first HTML5 site.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it play nice on Internet Explorer 8 – which is, of course, the browser used by my client. It’s possible – likely, even – that there are solutions to the problems I had with HTML5, but I didn’t have quite enough time to follow through.
But I will say that it felt very close. I think my first HTML5 site is not far away.