A fresh, UX rich website redevelopment
Hutchinson Legal asked us to take on their website redevelopment and create a site that visually aligned with their brand, was user-friendly, mobile responsive and provided their marketing team with an easy-to-use content management system.
At the time of commissioning the website redevelopment, their current WordPress site was looking stale, rigid and was a regular source of grief because the backend (and CMS) was so restrictive and difficult to use.
Our current website was very dated and not very functional. We needed a beautiful new, engaging website; but we also needed to be able to migrate the large amount of content over to the new site, which was a very big task.
Wide Open Co. uses a research-based and collaborative approach to design in order to fully understand the needs of our clients. We know project management is key to success and for this reason we started this project, as we do all website projects, evaluating the pros and cons of ideas and options available to us so that we can determine how best to approach a redevelopment that would tick all the boxes for Hutchinson Legal.
This process confirmed the following:
Must Haves: Consistent branding; Minimalistic friendly, professional, timeless design; Easy to navigate - UX that makes sense; Gender equality; Featuring welcoming human images; Clear, prominent top navigation bar; Icon-based service navigation; Social links; Top navigation always visible; and Prominent CTAs.
As the creators of the Hutchinson Legal brand identity (developed in 2018), Wide Open Co. were well placed to assemble a simple mood board to confirm the desired visual atmosphere of the site.
During the planning phase, we expanded the user experience (UX) feature set to include a few suggestions of our own, eg. dynamic FAQs. These and other required elements were incorporated into high fidelity wireframes and well received by Hutchinson Legal.
While Hutchinson Legal worked on updating their content, we undertook the significant task of designing a site with more than a dozen unique page templates, a hero carousel, calls to action, icon sets, tab and multi-select filtering architecture, and various other desired moving parts.
Having moved beyond revisions and content collection, development started in earnest. A combination of stock photography and portrait photography were carefully selected, old content was migrated, cleaned and massaged into the new CMS, and training sessions were undertaken. The new website was given the green light on 1 March.
The website has been really well received and we have already seen an increase in traffic, enquiries and bookings. We feel as a company that we have a modern, engaging site that we are really proud of. The graphics are really beautiful and the website functions fabulously.
