heads4business: web design and corporate identity for a recruitment firm

The relationship did not start with the website: NK IT Service had previously looked after the client's IT and set up systems on site. In 2012 this led to the commission for a comprehensive relaunch of the company website: a fresh direction in content and design with an eye to its sales impact, a move to a content management system, a renaming with a corporate identity for website, signage, letterhead and business cards, and vacancy management as a bespoke database application.

The screen design (the visual layout of the pages) uses a calm palette of cyan blue, grey and white with a single orange accent. The home page opens with an image slider (a set of pictures that change automatically) whose motifs carry the positioning: one blue fish in a shoal of grey ones with the question ‘Sie suchen etwas anderes?’ (looking for something different?), and one blue paper boat among white ones with the line ‘Vermittlung von Führungskräften’ (executive placement). A welcome text and a list of benefits follow; two entry points in the header, ‘Für Unternehmen’ (for companies) and ‘Für Bewerber’ (for candidates), take each visitor straight to the relevant page. The layout has a fixed width of 890 pixels, as was standard at the time, and uses the system fonts Verdana and Georgia (fonts already installed on the visitor's computer), so no web fonts are fetched from third-party servers.

On the technical side, NK IT Service built a bespoke HTML/CSS template (the page framework into which the content management system inserts the content) for the open-source CMS Sefrengo, which runs on the PHP programming language and a MySQL database. Text and images can be edited in the CMS without touching the code. For the vacancies, NK IT Service programmed a dedicated database application in PHP 5 and MySQL: positions are entered online and listed with title and date on the ‘Offene Positionen’ (open positions) page. The 2012 brief also included Google Analytics (visitor statistics) and a Google Sitemaps connection (a page index for the search engine), as well as maintenance and support after launch.

Consulting, concept, screen design, image editing, template code and database programming came from one team, as did the visual identity for signage, letterhead and business cards. The client therefore had a single point of contact for IT, website and corporate identity – a way of working that NK IT Service has followed in Rastatt since 2006 and maintains to this day.