Douglas Wallace Website Spotlight
Our old website had become stagnant and was in need of a total refresh. We appointed Sprint Digital to overhaul our business online and we were really impressed with their innate understanding of our business. They made the entire process seamless and hassle-free and we are over the moon with the finished product.
Overview
In 2020 sprint Digital embarked on an exciting project with Douglas Wallace Architects to build and revamp their business website. Douglas Wallace are a well-known and trusted architecture firm based in Dublin and founded over 30 years ago. Today Douglas Wallace have completed over 1000 successful projects from bespoke homes and hotels to large scale residential complexes.
Our Objective
Douglas Wallace had an existing website in 2020, however, due to the sheer amount of large high-quality images and moving graphics they struggled with site speed when showing off their highly important projects.
They needed an easy-to-manage website that allowed them to quickly add in their new projects and showcase them in an attractive way to potential clients.
The Challenge
- The sheer number of images and assets will slow down the website speed
- Many past projects and a continuing to grow portfolio can create a confusing experience for a website user
- To create an easy to use website template for adding new projects to the Douglas Wallace portfolio
- Ensure the website maintained a standard of security and speed after moving to the new website
Process
First things first – we met with the team at Douglas Wallace to discuss their needs and wants from the website. Before beginning any website build we always want to ensure that we know what features and aspects of the website are most important. As the Douglas Wallace branding and colours would remain the same, we could get right to creating a sitemap and initial homepage design. Once everyone was happy with the overall look and concept for the website we could get to work.
As site speed was an issue on their previous website, we would be moving the existing domain and staging website to our high speed and secure host. This allows us more security for the website as well as faster site speed.
Next, we gathered all the assets from their vast portfolio of previous and ongoing architectural builds. While the high-resolution photos of Douglas Wallace’s projects were stunning, high-resolution and large photos are notorious for slowing down a website’s speed. We compressed each image to reduce the file size while keeping the quality.
With the vast amount of experience and projects from Douglas Wallace we needed to create an easy-to-navigate layout for any user visiting the website for the first time. We created custom templates for adding each project based on the individual category of the project. For example, a potential customer looking for an architecture firm for a new commercial build would easily filter all the projects to only show similar previous commercial developments.
We designed an easy-to-use template so the team at Douglas Wallace could effortlessly add any new projects to their new website. We added additional plugins that would also continue to optimise any new media and assets to the website after launch, to help ensure a high quality and fast website experience.
Results
With the improvement of new website assets and new categorisation of the projects the website became a clear and easy to use tool for potential clients to see the vast portfolio of Douglas Wallace.
We also added additional features such as a ‘featured work’ section on the home page so the team could easily showcase a particular project they were working on. The website is bright, functional, and clearly shows the professionalism and vast experience of Douglas Wallace.
