Good UX practice expertly matches business goals to user needs. People love good design and great content, but the biggest drivers of satisfaction are easy interactions and transactions that give people what they want with the minimum of effort and friction.

Sparks have a clear point of view on what investing in user experience should bring to a project, and a set of UX tools and approaches that we’ve seen deliver value time and time again. Research, goal setting, user stories, wireframes, prototyping and user testing all have their place in exploring how best to bring to business and the customer together, and deliver a successful outcome for each. When this is done early in the project, it enables better decision making at every stage that follows.

UX reviews and ongoing measurement of success hitting website KPIs is an important part of our support approach. Websites become great through regular attention to identifying and fixing areas of low performance, and measuring what matters to the visitor and maximising their value.

Approaches to website design have come and go with the fashions over the last 20 years, but user interface design and front end builds that are fast to load and easy to use never go out of style.

An early adopter of fluid layouts and Responsive Web Design, Sparks specialise in websites that look good on any device. Menu systems that ‘just work’, navigation and content design that make information findable, advanced search interfaces that turn deep content into results that surface according to user need are all part of the UI toolkit.

With some of the most experienced digital creatives in the business, and a front end team that takes a disciplined approach to building with the latest frameworks and thinking, you can rely on Sparks Interactive to deliver a beautiful, functional website on mobile, tablet and desktop. Using modern media asset management you can be assured that your images and video are optimised for fast downloads at the highest quality, including full HD and retina screen resolutions.

Our visual design is not simply satisfied with being good looking. We continually work to improve website performance through user testing and ongoing analytics. Tools such as Crazy Egg and Hotjar for heatmapping, Google Analytics for landing page to exit page user flow, Google Tag Manager for conversion tracking and Pingdom Tools Website Speed Test alongside Chrome DevTools network analysis for performance optimisation are essential for best practice web design.

The Content Management System market is now clearly dominated by open source software that delivers comprehensive feature sets for everyone from the small business to the enterprise.

With over 20 years experience building database driven websites that enable the customer to manage their own content without knowing code, the Sparks team have found a home in Drupal - the leading open source content management system for clients where their website means business.

If your website is a critical piece of infrastructure driving digital transformation for you and your clients then you need a CMS that is robust, reliable and flexible. Get everything you want, and nothing you don’t need, from Drupal’s modular and expandable architecture. Component suites for media asset management, workflow, users and single sign-on (SSO) management including Active Directory and RealMe integration as well as consumer-friendly credentials such as Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts, content-driven information architecture and enterprise level search options with Apache Solr and Elasticsearch are all tried, tested and market-proven implementations available from Sparks Interactive.

Sparks development adheres to Drupal coding standards and actively contributes code back to the Drupal open source community. We are internationally recognised for our industry contribution, sponsorship and organisation of events to sustain a better community. Our preference is to work with pre-packaged distributions and collaborate with our peers and partners wherever possible in order to make better websites for everyone.

Ongoing support and maintenance, including security updates, along with managed hosting or BYO infrastructure. We keep your website humming!

Sparks’ business is built on long term relationships, and that means long term support. Responding quickly to issues and requests, planning for the future, and carrying out healthchecks to ensure optimal site performance requires a different level of discipline compared to project development.

We maintain a roster of development support staff with assigned duties, and a studio workflow that is designed to efficiently and effectively balance support against project work. Ongoing website maintenance has always been focus for Sparks interactive and includes support for the code base, patching, module updates and security advisory updates.

Support requests can be issued via phone, email or Freshdesk ticketing. Issues are triaged, prioritised and actioned to communicate clearly and deliver a quick response. Clients can test any code and functionality updates in secure test and staging environments prior to final go live.  

Sparks provide website monitoring through our infrastructure partners - typically Nagios alerts sent to email and SMS to the Producer providing client service lead for the site. By arrangement with the client we also provide 3rd party monitoring via UptimeRobot (The world's leading uptime monitoring service).

Sparks Interactive provide support for over 120 active websites, and can arrange hosting with premium support through one of our select infrastructure partners, including New Zealand’s leading cloud specialists, or work with your hosting provider or inhouse team to keep your website in perfect health.

Make connections and maximise conversions. Keep it simple with fundamental principles and keen audience insight.

Sparks take a systematic approach to traffic generation: identify users, leverage behavioural and profile data, then align SEO, SEM and display messages to deliver a consistent message.

By co-ordinating the digital marketing with onsite UX and landing page creative, we can match the expectations created by the marketing - improving both quality scores and most importantly conversion metrics through more successful page interaction.

Effective marketing is not just about getting your message out as widely as possible, to get the most value from marketing spend, it is essential that you reach the right audience for your website. Bringing people to your site, who then simply leave straight away, is a waste of money. Worse, it affects quality scores and takes attention and effort away from worthwhile activity that drives growth.

From our very earliest days Sparks Interactive have worked with clients who depend on quality traffic to grow their business online. We provide specialist expertise, and co-ordinate seamlessly with external agencies across a range of design, marketing, media and search services to reach audiences, make connections and deliver success.