Challenging Design

Cyber Security Challenge (CSC) aims to uncover hidden cyber security talent from across the UK through competitions, challenges and learning programs, and then work to develop their skill sets to help them enter the industry.

It’s an exciting world, and their work uncovers some immense talent (we attempted one of the competitions, and it’s fair to say we didn’t make the grade!). However, the complete redesign of their website was a challenge more up our alley.

CSC asked us to provide a dynamic new design, supported by a whole new CMS. To improve on their out of date and inflexible system we suggested Wordpress as the best platform. Due to its blogging past, many dismiss Wordpress as an inferior CMS option, however, don’t be fooled! It’s moved on leaps and bounds over the years, becoming the most popular platform in the world. With a global community of developers and resource, Wordpress is ever improving making it a powerful and future proof solution. And being selected by a company specialising in cyber security must give it some brownie points!

All design requires a good foundation, so at the start of this project we worked closely with CSC to define how they wanted to feature their content, along with identifying their target audiences and the journeys they’re likely to take on the site. From here we created a sitemap and a series of wireframes to define key areas of content.

Once we had a plan in place we were able to move on to the look and feel of the site, creating a homepage with a dynamic ‘magazine’ style, allowing different types of content (article, video etc) to be added helping to keep it looking fresh.

The final stage is the build, during this time we also fine tune aspects such as the responsive layout. Although this is addressed early on, it can’t be finalised until the site is constructed - for example the initial breakpoints were adjusted to better fit Google’s small Nexus 7 tablet screen size.

The site is then ready to be unleashed on the world, and is transferred over to the chosen hosting provider – in this case Skyscape who supply and manage incredibly secure website hosting – website security is an obvious requirement given the subject matter! Take a look at the site and let us know what you think.