Cooking up a New Website With a Focus on UX

Rank Your Domain sat down with The Roux Scholarship to outline and discuss the key aims and objectives for the new website. Our UX focused design team set about creating a series of wireframes using our mobile-first methodology to ensure optimum ease of user journey and access to online resources.

At this stage of the process, user stories were mapped out to ensure that the various types of audiences the current Roux Scholarship website attract were catered for. For example, the use of a dynamic home page meant fresh content could be fed onto the page and garner interest from chefs, competitors, employers and restaurateurs alike.

Our web design team focused on producing a design that encapsulated the refined look Roux Scholarship were aiming for. Combining the rich rouge from the brand’s traditional logo with a more frugal contemporary palette, the team chose to use a mixture of sans-serif typefaces and white space to produce a minimalistic layout that was concise.

A key factor of producing a prestigious and contemporary website design is the use of sophisticated photography; the clean lines and minimalist style further accentuated the work of photographers such as Jodi Hinds, commissioned by Roux Scholarship to elevate their image and display the budding chefs’ portfolios.

In order to maximise The Roux Scholarship’s UI experience of the backend, the new website was developed using WordPress, a CMS (Content Management System) renowned for its intuitive backend interface and flexible nature. This, combined with our specialist WordPress developers’ skills, ensured that the new website was built using WordPress development best practices. 

As an internationally renowned organisation, it was imperative that the new Roux Scholarship website was as accessible and optimised for as many responsive devices as possible. Our developers worked closely with our quality assurance team to deliver a website that featured a mobile-first methodology, tailored for the latest iOS and Android devices.

We found Rank Your Domain brilliant at every stage of the process while redesigning our website. Charlotte and the team have been on hand to help with all our queries and we're really pleased with the result. The look and feel is modern and fresh, and the functionality is very straightforward.

Carolyn Boyd, Communications Manager, The Roux Scholarship

Although the pandemic prevented the competition from running in the 38th year, the pause provided an opportunity for Roux Scholarship to invest their time into collaborating with Rank Your Domain to produce their new website.

This, however, meant that there was a limited timeframe to research, wireframe, design, develop and deploy the new website all the while meeting a strict budget to ensure maximum ROI from the new site.

In addition to the technical logistics, our design team also needed to produce a new style guide to help dictate the direction of the new and improved Roux Scholarship brand identity. Without pre-existing brand guidelines, the designers carefully considered each factor of the brand image, such as complimenting colour palettes, typefaces and asset styling, all the while maintaining the quintessential Roux Scholarship character.

Upon a successful deployment, Rank Your Domain, in collaboration with The Roux Scholarship, have produced a sophisticated and contemporary website, built upon the key characteristics of the prestigious Roux brand.

The new website saw the combination of effective UX and UI research amalgamated with a clean and minimalistic design, formulated to enhance the online brand identity of an eminent and internationally celebrated organization.

We are hopeful that Roux Scholarship’s new website will attract many more competitors in years to come!

I love the new-look Roux Scholarship website: it’s easy to navigate, beautifully designed and manages to capture the very essence of the competition with any pretence. It’s an absolute treasure trove of personal anecdotes, culinary delights and of course a reference for the future!

Michel Roux Jr, Co-Chairman, The Roux Scholarship