The look of the new site has been designed by Joe Cook of tothepoint to help underpin and promote the PR agency’s passion for the science, engineering and technology sectors. This has been achieved by a simple and creative showcasing of its core strengths in media relations, strategy development and content creation.
The site builds on Matter PR’s brand identity which was also designed by tothepoint and is based on the periodic table of elements. The iconic nature of the periodic squares with abbreviations becomes a visual toolkit for the team at Matter PR to use. This is further supported by using a clean and simple design format with engaging and impactful photography.
Matter PR’s Managing Director David Reid said:
“Our old website was quite text heavy and had a lot of content which could be confusing. We wanted our new site to be very simple and effective – giving a very clear sense of who we are, what we care about, and what our strengths are without having to navigate around too much. tothepoint have created a visually stunning website which showcases our passion for science but also communicates our business and services really clearly.”
Our relationship with David goes back a long way, having worked with him on major branding projects and campaigns when he was at Deafness Research UK, the EPSRC and more recently the Transport Systems Catapult. Matter PR is a relatively new business but has solid experience in this exciting sector. We really wanted to help ensure this site not only worked to communicate this breadth of experience for him and the team but also that it was user-friendly and didn’t break the bank.
We are usually advocates of bespoke websites where you can tailor everything to the brand and messaging. We have always found off-the-shelf themes to be limiting and often more difficult to adapt than building from scratch. However, we jointly decided this would be a great opportunity to experiment with themes and see if one or more could be adapted to fit the brief. We both had another agenda – to find a way to offer a more cost-effective site for some of our start-up clients and even for initial design stages of a project where we want to bring a concept to life.
After quite a lot of searching and testing, we found a few WordPress themes that were stable, had simple interfaces for the users and actually provided a more sophisticated design look and feel. We’d still prefer the bespoke approach but this project has given us another service level when it comes to website design and implementation.