Client: Astera / Role: Designer and Developer / Technologies: Illustrator, Figma, html, css, javascript, php, WordPress / VIEW LIVE WEBSITE
Astera is a company based in Dubai involved in the oil industry. Their mission is to help companies involved in the oil industry in the middle east, especially in the Kurdistan region, accessing industry related data and facilitating business operations and communication on that sector in that region.
Target audience
- Anyone operating in the oil & gas industry in the middle east especially in the Kurdistan region looking for a way to access and provide data relating to the industry in question as well as promote their business and create partnerships.
Project goals
- Create a corporate website to promote Astera’s services related to the oil & gas industry, mainly Astera’s oil & gas portal for companies involved in the sector in the Kurdistan region.
Website design process
Stage 1: Discover
- Defining the culture and values of the company.
- Qualitative investigation by doing surveys to understand potential users, who they are as well as what their goals and needs consist of.
Stage 2: Define
- Analysing qualitative user data, creating a proto-persona in order to describe and analyse pain points, goals and needs of our most accurate user.
- Proto-persona summary: Mark is the CEO of an oil exploration company that operates in the middle east. He is looking for a platform where he can promote his services as well as access data related to the industry and and create business partnerships with companies operating in the region in the same industry.
Stage 3: Develop
- Wireframes stage. Iterative process where the main target was to arrive at a website structure as well as a look and feel that could reflect the client’s expectations.
- Visual style guides nailed down the look and feel of the product.
- Implementing visual style guides.
- User testing to detect and fix any usability issues that might persist.
At this point the design process has reached a stage where the developer needs to implement it. Considering I have taken part on this project both as designer and developer my work was not quite done yet.
I have made the decision to make use of WordPress which is a technology I have vast experience in and it can meet the client’s regarding being given flexibility to manipulate content on his own. Also, it’s a technology that is widely popular and has a huge community behind it which makes ideal for projects such as this one.
Conclusion
The goals of the project have been achieved. The design and development process helped creating a truly meaningful and engaging product for the user and met the client’s vision. The technology used allows the client to edit, delete and create content as he wishes which gives him a great level of control over the website and that was one of the client’s requirements.