Building our Mearns & Gill Website

Recognising that our website needed an update, we set about creating a new site that would better reflect who we were as a business and to improve how we showed off our work and services to potential clients.

The redesign of our website is covered in a separate Insight by Cam Duthie entitled 3 steps to navigate your next re-design. We followed these steps ourselves to determine what we wanted to achieve with a redesign, what our business and marketing goals were for the new site and how we could improve the user experience.

Overall, the theme was more ‘image-led’. Less text, less explanations and just let our work tell the story of what we do best.

So, to understand how we turned our ideas into a reality, here are some details from our web developers James & Rob on the key elements of building our new website.

Craft was chosen as the CMS (Content Management System) for the site primarily due to its flexibility. Some of the Mearns & Gill team were already comfortable using Craft but aside from that it gave us ‘no constraints’ in how we developed the site. Rob comments: “Craft is a leading CMS and with good reason. It is easy to use allowing a speedy setting up of the back-office part of the website, keeping the build time down and it’s impressively up to date in terms of its technical capabilities and security.”

Ensuring a positive user experience on the site was a priority. The site had to be visually interesting and encourage visitors to navigate through the site to view our projects, events and services.

James explains: “One of the big changes was moving to a client-based structure rather than project by project, giving the user the chance to see the diversity of what we deliver for clients across a variety of sectors. Our Homepage would naturally lead the visitor to our client work and then filters would allow them to refine their search by key categories. Everything was to be image driven, ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ the user what we do.”

Every section of the site had its own purpose and design. This is where good website design shines through with planned content and functionality for each part focused on providing information that users are searching for. They key points for each section of our site were as follows:

Our work – this was all about content and being able to show off our work in a visually interesting way. Good use of content blocks in the CMS allowed us to achieve this. Related content also allows users to navigate to comparable types of work.

Our services – we had a lot to say here, but we controlled the layout so information could be consumed in bite size chunks and our bespoke illustrations prevent these pages from being too overwhelming.

Our team – a simple who’s who page but built so that our team shots can be pulled through as author thumbnails to our News & Insights pages.

News & Insights – separate pages to distinguish between the latest developments about what’s happening within Mearns & Gill (News) & opinion pieces from ‘our experts’ in graphic design, brand strategy, website development, digital marketing & event management (Insights). Flexible content blocks in the CMS were also critical here so that anyone in team can easily publish content incorporating text, images & video.

Contact – a straightforward form for users to get in touch and a Call to Action on the footer of every page with the simple question “Got a project? Let’s get started”.

About Us – this was one of the more difficult sections, embedding historical videos into a vertical timeline to show key landmarks in our eight decades in business.

All web developers love employing up to date technologies and the Mearns & Gill site was no exception. Rob's list of highlights were “Using Tailwind CSS has made a huge difference. We no longer have to spend time working out how best to name everything. The speed and interactivity you get using Vue.js has also been a huge help. We’ve also started using the Craft CMS plugin SEOmatic which has already proven its worth.”

Some of our staff hadn’t used Craft CMS so once the new website was launched James provided training on the new site to his colleagues. “It was really simple. Just a matter of taking everyone through the key areas of the site and talking through with them what they can and can’t do. By the end of the training everyone was confident with their ability to publish new content on the website ensuring that the site will remain up to date.”

So we have a great new website as our ‘shop window’ showing visitors who we are and what we do. As everyone can now do it, we’re adding new content regularly and linking this to our social media activity which is driving new traffic to our website. A leap forward from our old website and well worth the effort.

If you're website needs updating, take a look at our web services page Our Services - Web and get in touch today for a chat about how we can help you create an attractive and dynamic website for your business.