The Goal
South West Steel Construction (SWSC) came to us in need of a complete overhaul of their existing website. As it stood, the old one was dated, not designed for responsiveness, and was a chore to update with new information. This was a particular issue, as adding to their portfolio is very important for showing prospective clients their latest, most impressive builds. There was also a need for an aesthetic update to bring their presentation more in line with how established the business has become over the years.
What did we do?
As part of our standard website setup, we went through the current sitemap with the client and discussed ways to improve the organisation of the navigation, helping to channel people into the right places on the website. These upgrades highlighted a need for a more structured layout to the site with more calls to action to help signpost people to related pages, especially on the homepage. For a business that’s focussed on creating precisely designed and structured steel buildings, putting a strong, confident structure in place was important. We focused on a clean, solid block layout that fits with the kind of buildings they create.
There were elements the client liked from the old site they wanted to carry over, the key ones were the colour palette and the use of the icon from the logo. We incorporated the colours throughout the site with the red as the main featured colour, adding a complimentary grey and the icon as a background element throughout the site to tie each page into the branding clearly. For the fonts, we chose a new, strong, bold sans serif to tie into their metalworking business and complete the reconstruction. Overall, the new design represents their business and established position, while also carrying over just enough familiarity from the existing site that people who know the business already won’t feel lost.
Another issue with the old site was a lack of imagery, with some pages only featuring tiny thumbnails to break up large blocks of text. We utilised the ordered block structure of the new design to plan out more opportunities for imagery, pulling in more photography from the client. We also added in some categorised galleries to the site, allowing for them to show off their large library of previous work in a simpler way, alongside the most important jobs which receive full case studies. The South West Steel site also contained a detailed quoting form that needed to be carried over to the new site, ensuring all the functionality was maintained even as the styling was updated to match the new site.
The client had decided to create the new copy for their new website, so when the build was completed with their new design, we input their text and image content and ensured every text area and page of the website was populated and that the client was happy with how everything looked.
It’s time to launch
We carried out an SEO transfer for this site to ensure the rankings that the old website had built up over the many years it has existed would be maintained once the new site launched. We analysed elements like meta titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, image alt tags, URL structure and keyword-rich content to ensure all elements were maintained. We ensured all URLs from the old site were preserved where relevant, redirected them where necessary, carried over old content that was still relevant and read over the new content to make sure it fits in well.
One of the main things that help maintain the existing rankings is preserving the keywords used on the site (these are any key terms/phrases that your website appears for when they are searched), so we reviewed the content to ensure any keywords had been carried across. We also made sure to double check all previous tracking code was carried over, along with site load speed tests to ensure none of this was lost.
In the case of this website, we found some old product pages which were not visible on the website, but which Google had indexed and were ranking for some key phrases. We created a newer page on the website that we were able to redirect these pages to, which would support those keywords on the new website and would prevent those rankings slipping down.
Afterwards, we performed our regular QC (quality control) checks, double checking every aspect of the site to ensure there’s no little issues in the site responsiveness or with broken links ready for the launch.
If you want to take a look at their new website for yourself, you can take a look here.
If you’re looking for a new website or would like to discuss any other functionalities of your website, please contact us today, and we will be more than happy to help.