In early 2006, Luna Design worked closely with Axium's Marketing
Communications team to redesign their corporate website
(www.axiumae.com) and overhaul its
architecture so non-developers can manage the site's content.
Since Axium already had a graphic designer on staff, Luna focused on the
information architecture and interaction design while collaborating with
the graphic designer on layout and appearance issues. Luna Design also
drove the new software architecture featuring templates and user controls
on ASP.NET 1.1 that allows the Marcom team to edit HTML-like ASPX files and
reference the powerful user controls via an HTML tag-like syntax. As
needed, additional user controls can be engineered and then dropped in for
use by the Marcom team.
Some project highlights included:
- Home Page
- This page features an introduction to the company (emphasized by a Flash
animation and larger intro text) and its products. Also featured are key
sales resources such as product webinars, demos and user conferences and
company differentiators.
- Main Products Page
- This page reiterates the company's general product focus and then divides
into two side-by-side areas to explain its two main products and their
differences. A lot of effort was spent organizing and refining the content
throughout the site to make sure varying target audiences (ranging from
people unfamiliar with Axium to long-time customers) could quickly understand
what the company and its products are about anf find the information they
are seeking.
- Products Pages
- As Axium's software packages offer very comprehensive feature sets, it
was necessary to provide for two levels of navigation under each product to
group similar concepts together. In this example, the General Ledger
features for Axium's Ajera product are explained. Notice that this page is
grouped with the rest of the product's accounting features but kept close
to its other top level features so the site visitor gets a good idea of the
breadth of features.
- Registration Pages
- Luna Design created database-driven registration controls to handle
displaying available events, taking user registration info and sending
confirmation e-mails. These general purpose controls were set up with full
field validation and are parameter driven so they can be used for
registering people for different types of events.
- Site Search
- Luna Design investigated various search engine packages for Axium and
integrated one into the site via another custom user control.
