Astrolabe Group

Reputation is key for Astrolabe Group and communicating their services and expertise effectively goes a long way to winning bids on exciting local, state and federal projects.

Project Contribution.

Briefing and design thinking workshops.

I met with Astrolabe Group back in September 2018 as their they were experiencing some good growth and felt their website needed to be redeveloped in order to truly get across their message.

As often is the case with a company that is experiencing fast growth, some parts of the business grow quicker then others. For Astrolabe, their current problem was that their messaging hadn't quite been defined.

This was a problem for our website copy.

To counteract this issue, I felt it was appropriate to conduct some design thinking workshops with Astrolabe to try and better articulate what they do, and considering they are experts in design thinking, they were very willing to work in fashion.

Selling reputation and belief.

Astrolabe operate in a space that combines local, state and federal governments as well as agencies working towards creating more liveable, sustainable and smart cities.

They way they get their work, is predominately through tender bids and existing clients. This website wasn't about selling any one product, it was about selling the expertise and experience of the Astrolabe team.

The plan for their website was to be an additional channel for their marketing activities.

On this site people would be able to see their strategising and execution of projects through case studies of previous work, and a blog that allowed Astrolabe to demonstrate its depth in understanding of government policy and frameworks and how to utilise these to create better communities.

Website design and development.

In collaboration with another UI designer we worked together to create responsive mockups for the site. After a round of review, we commenced the site development.

Based on Astrolabe Group's needs, we determined that moving from SquareSpace to WordPress site, hosted on a basic GoDaddy plan would suit their needs, at least for the medium term.

Leadership qualities

	Workshop facilitation - keeping the team focussed on meeting outcomes.
Stakeholder management - Managing the client, their required tasks for the project as well as the design and development of the site along with Alex.
Project Management - From the brief to the delivery, I was in charge of keeping the project on track, which meant chasing up deliverables, adjusting timelines when people where snowed under or overwhelmed.
  

Challenges

The content was a really iterative and collaborative process. While this wasn't originally accounted for in the project timeline, by better understanding Astrolabe and their messaging, I was able to help create solutions and communicate the site development and design changes with my colleague, who was assisting with both.

Lessons learned

I learned that good content is absolutely critical. As much as that cool design, as much as the smooth interaction. While I think we got there in the end, I think the project would have been better served if more time and effort was spent on establishing a keyphrase strategy and setting some benchmark numbers for SEO, to track our efforts from the launch of the site.