Rebecca A Smith
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MS Datastep, Inc.

MS Datastep is a custom web application development company. They focus on building highly functional, robust systems. Their work will step up a client’s capabilities and elevate their staff’s productivity. For their website redesign, I used a stairway theme as a play on the company name, and as an inspirational imagery of where MS Datastep can take potential new clients.

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The target audience for this website is middle to upper management. In other words - the folks that do the research and provide recommendations to the decision makers. Most of MS Datastep’s clients are business people who have a highly technical nee

The target audience for this website is middle to upper management. In other words - the folks that do the research and provide recommendations to the decision makers. Most of MS Datastep’s clients are business people who have a highly technical need, but may or may not know developer lingo. Often they have IT departments that are too busy to take on their project, so they must look elsewhere for a solution all on their own.

I kept the site limited to a straightforward set of pages, and used language that walked the line between business manager and technical guru. Scan-able bullet points, keywords and short explanations give users a solid picture of who MS Datastep is, and shows they have worked on the kind of challenges the reader faces, without making them wading through white papers or an every expanding tree of pages of barely intelligible tech talk. I wanted to give the researchers something they can repeat in meetings.

The stairs chosen for the About Us page are spiral, reaching down into the history of the company.

The stair image for system integration was a particular challenge. I wanted to represent two places, like two islands, connected together, because in it’s simplest interpretation that is the main goal of system integration. I found an image of two l

The stair image for system integration was a particular challenge. I wanted to represent two places, like two islands, connected together, because in it’s simplest interpretation that is the main goal of system integration. I found an image of two landmasses connected with a staircase carved out of hillsides, that bridged a space over churning water. It was perfect metaphor for how MS Datastep can bridge seemingly old, monolithic systems, and avoid needing a sea of employees to port data manually.

This is my own photograph from the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine, famous for it’s paths lines with tori gates. It is in keeping with the theme of stairs, but I also likened the gates to colorful bar charts, or a repeating data pattern. Business Intell

This is my own photograph from the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine, famous for it’s paths lines with tori gates. It is in keeping with the theme of stairs, but I also likened the gates to colorful bar charts, or a repeating data pattern. Business Intelligence deals with taking data and mining it for usable information. New insights are made by discovering patterns in the data, and those insights can guide the business in effective directions.

The best representation for building custom software in our stair theme was obvious to me: stairs under construction. This image in particular, with the close up view that creates almost abstract shapes from the lumber frame, was a great analogy of

The best representation for building custom software in our stair theme was obvious to me: stairs under construction. This image in particular, with the close up view that creates almost abstract shapes from the lumber frame, was a great analogy of the complex framework that lays under the polished UI of a web application.