Introduction

Hi I am Piia Jonninen, one of the Metropolia blog editors. I met up with Marko Soini to discuss the design and launch of our schools new website. Let us know what you think about the site, hopefully you like it.

Hi, who are you, and how are you connected with Metropolia Business School’s new web-site?

I’m Marko Soini, a 29 year old website designer from Kokkola and I have designed the Metropolia Business School’s International unit’s new site.

What is your education and working experience?

Almost every thing in graphical skills I have learned by myself. I worked for about a year in an advertising agency where I gained a lot of new information and experience especially in printing. A regards websites, I’ve been making them for about 10 years. For more specific information about me, my portfolio and my history go to www.markosoini.net

Before you got the order to do new sites for Metropolia Business School, was Metropolia familiar to you in anyway, and what kind of image did you have in mind as regards Metropolia?

The school was not familiar to me before but the image I got from the Business School was a highly developed education system, really professional, sophisticated and youthful.

Did you have a free hand in developing and designing the website or were there some limits or suggestions you needed to follow?

I pretty much had a free hand in designing the look of the site. However they had already an older website and an idea for a new look to the school’s site, so I had a good base from where to continue working on a new look. Marko Korkeakoski and John Greene did great job informing me of their needs and I quickly got all the information and material I needed from them. From all the limits and suggestions we had, we got to the present conclusion smoothly and the co-operating worked well.

What was your starting point on creating the web pages? What was your main goal?

The School’s need for a fresh look worked as an inspiration. My main goal was to give the new web pages a fresh new image. I think that the combination of yellow, orange and black goes nicely together. Marko Korkeakoski’s pictures of the students were at the essential role in creating the freshness of the pages.

Compared to previous web pages, what did you want to improve? Did you manage to do that?

Compared to previous pages, the new pages included a little bit more material and information, such as the MyMetropolia section. Navigation also need to be changed somewhat. The main improvements in my opinion were the page’s freshness and more interactive content.

The challenge itself was to get already good looking web pages and make them even better. I really liked the previous website and pages, but I’m glad that I was able to take the challenge and I believe I did good job.

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