Design Challenge and Design Ideas

Carron + Walsh is a professional consultancy practice specialising in Quantity Surveying, Project Controls and Project Management. They are a young company trying to compete with more established players in the market. Despite being only a few years old, Carron + Walsh has considerable international experience that was not being effectively communicated online.

Our objectives for their new website were:

* Showcase C+W as a young, dynamic company that is considerably more experienced than its years might suggest
* Demonstrate the scale and breadth of expertise and experience within the firm
* Raise the company’s profile to in the eyes of both the public and peers to increase referrals and recommendations
* Act as a referral destination (architects and other industry affiliates sending clients to the site)
* Feature the separate industry sectors served by Carron and Walsh supported by relevant case studies
* Attract quality candidates to grow the team

How the brief was fulfilled

To address the brief we first of all gave the logo a design refresh. The C+W identity was dated and not reflective of a young dynamic brand.

We overhauled the site architecture – the existing website sitemap was confusing and ambiguous. The content was verbose and extensive and there was no variety in typography or content styling. The messaging needed to be bold and assertive. We stripped back excess content and used punchy, succinct headline statements to lend a confident purposeful air to the experience.

Imagery was incorporated where possible to support the text and provide a visual, emotive experience for the visitor. We used a colour palette of navy and orange to maintain a consistent brand presence throughout.

As Carron + Walsh specialise in construction, the homepage features a timelapse video of a development in progress to set a dynamic industry context to the page content.

We designed a map with animated markers to showcase the global spread of projects conducted by C+W to convey the extent of their international experience.
We also ensured that the homepage showcases other services that C+W are less well known for. Many Irish clients are unaware that C+W has project management and development expertise in addition to quantity surveying. The homepage invites further exploration of all three.

The website’s backend CMS is specifically designed to allow C+W decide which projects they wish to feature at any given time. The focus may change depending on a particular tender they might be in consideration for.

For the projects section, we used full screen images with a filter that is automatically applied when they are uploaded via the CMS by C+W. The CMS also automatically resizes any image uploaded to fit the required dimensions. Every piece of text, image and caption on each page is editable via the CMS. C+W has full autonomy over their own content without requiring any technical or design expertise. Every page is custom-designed to ensure the content follows a visual narrative. The entire experience is responsive and design to adapt to any device without losing the aesthetic effect.