Most Competitive Youth - Cisco Systems International by Amedia Creative

The Process

Amedia & Cisco had several meetings to determine the target audience and requirements of the project. There was a great deal to consider visually and functionally, in addition, the careful approach to design and build an interactive portal, additionally gain the approval of SAGIA (Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority).

Information Architecture

One major challenge with this project was the language barrier. Amedia needed to architect two web sites, one for the English language, and one for the Arabic language. Due to the fact that Arabic is read right to left, and English is read left to right, Amedia opted to build a custom language switcher, not only switching translated text, but images and style sheets as well. Priding ourselves on our the visual appearance of our projects, we needed to ensure that the project made a positive visual impact in both languages. Additionally, Cisco used our Las Vegas consultants to provide social media strategies and search engine optimization (SEO) in both Arabic and English.

Design

Always a challenge when several organizations are involved; designing an interactive portal which will render brand consistent with Cisco, SAGIA, and the parent company Most Competitive Youth. All of these interactive brands consist of bold typefaces and loud colors which would need to be used to enhance the visual appearance of the site without clashing. Cisco and Amedia met periodically during this phase to guarantee that all features were properly branded, pixel by pixel, to meet the expectations of sponsoring companies.

Development

Amedia worked closely with Cisco in order to bring the MCY Innovation interactive portal design to life. Utilizing finished interactive designs as functional specifications, Amedia was able to crank out a fully built site within four weeks. The tight deadline forced Amedia's team to work in tandem, the frontend team building out the user interface while the systems team and the development team did the heavy lifting with the core functionality, database, and content management system.

In the final stages of development, both teams met, and with careful planning, was able to seamlessly merge their development code into a finished product to present to Cisco one week before the deadline.