Off The Leash Magazine

The Background

The offline version of Off The Leash is the fantastically popular monthly guide to what’s on across The Top End. With a fresh dose of branding from Boab the magazine was completely revamped, and that new design needed carrying through into the digital space.

Off The Leash focuses on promoting events to a huge range of people, from those interested in music, arts, books, films, festivals, family events and everything inbetween. They needed a website that would become the ultimate online hub for everyone searching for events in the NT, and would tie in the with updated monthly printed version. 

The Project

The old website had been hanging around for a while had had lost its ability to compete in the modern digital space. The old website was stuck to a smaller grid size, and in that smaller space the information was cluttered and uninspiring.

We started again from scratch and considered everything that this website would need. First of all it was important to work out the navigation and structure. Why would people come to this website, and what are they looking for? The old website had the navigation you might expect; Home, What’s On, Submit an Event, About Us etc. The problem with this for us, was that by giving equal weighting and emphasis on less important pages such as About Us you preventing people getting to what they come here for, the events. We created a multi layered website structure that pulled out the event categories in their own navigation, and one that stands out much more that than pages used much less often.

By doing this we have allowed people to get straight into the event type they’re interested in, directly from the home page.

The next step was to create a design that was mobile friendly. People use mobiles and tablets to access the web way more now ever. Depending on the device size that you are viewing the Off The Leash website on, you’ll get your own unique layout and style. The buttons and content are all set up to work in the best way for the device that you’re on, taking into account screensize, touchscreen vs mouse clicks and loading times over mobile networks. This means that no matter where they are and how they view the website, visitors will always have a successful web experience. 

Although these may seem like small things, they can make a huge difference to your website’s success. Making it easier to find information on a website, and reducing those mini annoyances for people means that they will leave with a more positive view and will be much more likely to use the website again.

We took the idea of making things easily digestible and worked through each of the page types on the website. This included the calendar of events, the news articles and the individual event pages. Each of these page types required us to evaluate what was most important from the event organisers perspective (which could include pricing or access details) and compare that to what the attendees might be wanting to see (exciting imagery, location details etc). We then had to balance these pages designs to allow both parties to be happy, whilst at the same time making sure that Off The Leash could easily add more pages and more events in the future.