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We are proud to announce the relaunch of online designer lingerie brand www.spoylt.com. Eyesparks has been working with the Spoylt team over the last six months redesigning their website and planning a "360 degree" marketing campaign that includes traditional print and online promotion. 

Spoylt Lingerie is designed by women for women - modern, ambitious, confident, successful women. The new site has a luxurious, sensuous look and feel which complements the Spoylt products. The e-commerce aspect of the site is elegant yet simple to use, taking online payments in multiple currencies and giving Spoylt staff full control over all orders, deliveries and stock. But there's no point in having a great website if you don't drive traffic to it and we have developed a strategy to do just that.

Given the brand's popularity with many Hollywood celebrities such as Eva Longoria and Mariah Carey, we established a Spoylt You Tube Channel (www.youtube.com/spoyltlingerie). On screen coverage of the brand can be featured here as well as a number of original videos created by Eyesparks. The first of these is a behind the scenes glimpse of the photo shoot for the new Tantalize Collection entitled "The Body in the Library" (see below). Shot in the stunning Stapleford Park Country House Hotel, Leicestershire this is one of four videos created to promote the new range.

In Addition, we have integrated the Web2.0 software product Constant Contact into the marketing mix so Spoylt can keep registered users informed of new collections and special offers through a series of email newsletters. Finally we have also developed www.spoyltblog.com using WordPress which allows Spoylt to issue all those press releases, videos and other pieces of relevant content that they might not want cluttering up the e-commerce site. The result is that interested parties can subscribe to the blog and receive up the minute information on Spoylt which they can then redistribute to their own website without adding complication (and therefore confusion) to the main Spoylt web offering. 

Feedback on the new site has already been very positive. We wish Spoylt every success and look forward to working with them again in the future.

At eyesparks we create great websites. We create them as part of a team - us and the customer. The styling that surrounds the site is important as is the technology that powers it, but the most important aspect of the site is the content. My web career began properly in 1997 when I designed the first Riverdeep website. I was the design director for the company and had been involved in every aspect of product development, so I knew the content inside out. During the four years that I was responsible for the site (which had over 1 million registered users when I left) my main priority was not the look and feel of the interface but the content that it housed. Second on the list was making sure that our users could find the content they were looking for and that it was engaging and useful when they got there.

I was surprised when I returned to Belfast at the lack of interest many web agencies seemed to have in their clients' content.  It is still a problem that many 'web design' companies are more obsessed with the technological structure of the website than the message or information the client wants to deliver through the site. A mistake many make is to take a task-orientated view of the web design process - 'architecture', 'programming', 'graphics' (a particular pet hate of mine) and finally 'content'. Often they place greatest value in their 'Content Management System' which combines the first three aspects and leaves the most important area in the hands of the client.

At Eyesparks we take a much more holistic approach to web design. We understand that a website is about the people who use it (the target audience) and what they get from that experience. So we start the process by looking at how you are going to talk to your target audience through the website. What you will say and how you will say it. Then we look at how those people might expect to find that information and we design the user interface to ensure a simple, rewarding experience. We develop all aspects of the site together to ensure that visually, technically and editorially we deliver the best possible experience for your target audience. And this ensures you get the best reaction to your content and therefore a sale. 

Your brand is not You. It is what your customer perceives You to be. We help our clients see themselves through their customers eyes.

We distil the essence of your ideal customer perception and pour it into your visual identity. When I say 'visual identity' I don't just mean your logo, I mean every aspect of how you brand is represented visually to your audience.

I'll outline how we approach a branding project:

• Understand the product/service
• Understand the target market
• Build a profile for each identifiable group within the target market 
• Analyse the market to understand where this brand can fit in relation to competitors and the customers' perception of them
• Create brand statements for each identified group within the target market - ie "what this brand means to me"
• Create logo options that will satisfy all or some of the target audience
• Present logos in conjunction with visualisations of the brand statements
• Agree how the brand should move forward and what changes, if any, the client company needs to make to their culture in order to fit their new brand
• Apply the new brand across all visual media
• Produce guidelines to ensure brand consistency going forward

Almost every project we undertake in our Belfast design studio involves some aspect of branding. Are a few great examples of branding projects on our website but one that benefited from the above methodology is Outdoor Scene.

While working on the testimonials for this website I had a flick through our old sketch pads. Since forming Eyesparks I've insisted that our designers keep a sketch pad and archive it when complete. So we have most of our day-to-day sketches for every job since 2002. It was interesting reading these visual diaries. As I flicked through my own set I noticed how the ratio of meeting notes to sketches has increased over the years and I began to lament the fact that I don't get to do as much sketching as I used to. As I thought about this I realised that as a designer you go through spells of having to relearn the basics. This often occurs when you've had to learn a new skill or relearn an old skill (usually when Adobe decides to change everything in the latest version of their software).

So in our production meeting this morning I reminded everyone that the most powerful tool in our armoury is the pencil. Ideas are less precious and people are more open to criticism and collaboration if they're only looking at sketches. Let's hope software manufacturers never get into pencil production - I don't want to have to relearn how to operate Pencil 2.0!