SMG programme features MMI sites

Glasgow group MMI has created a family of websites for Scottish media company SMG Television.

The consultancy was awarded the work, worth a six-figure fee, in December 2002, following a four-way unpaid creative and credentials pitch.

The eight websites, which re-launched last week, include a main site for SMG Television, www.smg television.co.uk, individual sites for Scottish TV and Grampian TV channels and an on-line search facility for the company’s library footage and clip sales.

It is hoped that the new portfolio of websites will give SMG Television a more ‘professional on-line presence and help it to increase its international profile’, says the company’s chief executive Donald Emslie.

SMG Television briefed the group to make its sites ‘more useable’ and ‘easier to navigate’, according to MMI senior designer Kerry Brown.

The new sites also had to incorporate content management systems to allow the company’s managers to ‘continually update [information on] them’, she says.

A grid format has been applied to all sites, which is ‘quite visual in the first instance with simple typographic top and side navigation’.

‘As users [drill down], the sites become less pictorial and have more titles and text,’ explains Brown.

The sites are primarily differentiated through colour. ‘We stuck with brand colouring for business-to-business resource areas, but used lots of different colours and pictures of presenters for the programming sites,’ she adds.