Independence Through Assistive Technology

Smile Smart Technology is a family-run enterprise dedicated to providing solutions for personal independence through Assistive Technology. They innovate and manufacture from UK workshops and reinvest the majority of the profits towards sustaining and improving their social mission of supporting children and adults with disabilities.

After working with the client on a number of other projects, The Creative Donut were invited to quote for designing and developing the a new website for the family business. After an extended period of planning and other hurdles such as Brexit, we began work in 2020.

As with all our website design and build projects we always start with a Site Map. Considering the logical ‘flow’ of a website is often underestimated, skipped or completed quickly in order to progress to the ‘sexier’ parts of a design project. This can cause big issues later once the project is in development. At this stage edits are easy. However if you wait to find structure issues during development, alterations can take days or weeks.

Getting the flow of a site right at the earliest opportunity is the best way to avoid future issues.

We spent extra time on the design stage of this project, because of the clients intended audience – heavily challenged by disability. We took time to research various standards and compliance guidelines in order to make the website as accessible and inclusive as possible. Some of our main resources included:

 

Special consideration was given to the ethos and mission of Smile Smart Technology when designing. There was a balance to be struck between eye-catching design, call to actions, and layouts that would allow for successful sales in the web shop. But also, Smile is a family-run business dedicated to providing solutions for personal independence. They invest a large proportion of profits in the development of technology, supporting their social mission of supporting children and adults with disabilities. In light of this accessibility can often be seen as harbouring good design where functionality needs to come before form. But in this case we feel we achieved the right balance.

Smile Smart had been working with an Illustrator for a number of years. Producing illustrations for print media and promotional material. Our challenge was to incorporate these character designs into a modern website. Striking a balance between fun/playful and a commercial business. We worked alongside this Illustrator to produce a number of icons specific to this website to represent the main areas – Products, Shop, Services & Resources.

Part of our work with Smile Smart was creating a space where they could provide resources and advice to customers, and position themselves as thought leaders within the industry. We did this in 2 ways:

1) Creating a Resource center with online and downloadable forms linking into services offered, brochures and product guides.
2) Designing a blog section where the team could post on a multitude of subjects, review products, offer tips and advice, etc.

When creating this site we integrated a number of different programs – WordPress, Stripe Payment, WooCommerce shop, Gravity Forms and What3Word…to name but a few. 

Following the launch of the site we continue to support Smile Smart on an on-going basis with updates, tech support, web shop management, traffic monitoring and analytics.

“Sam created a fresh new website for us integrating a wide variety of illustrations and media to excellent effect. Sam’s ability to programme the site himself and make changes in a short time were very helpful and cost effective in the build process. His helpful ‘how to’ tutorials quickly helped me learn the blogging and social media aspect of the new site. Having Sam’s ongoing monthly support is incredibly helpful and his tips and guidance on how to optimise your outputs are invaluable. I would highly recommend Sam to anyone. He is so easy to work with, nothing is too much trouble and he is always looking for innovative and exciting features to make websites shine. Great stuff!”

Esther Dakin
Director – Smile Smart Technology