Reid Middleton Website
I collaborated with a senior designer to spearhead the redesign of the Reid Middleton website; a multi-national civil and structural engineering company.
Themes
User Experience
UI Design
Marketing
Team
Myself and the Senior Designer
Tools
Dreamweaver, Photoshop
Timeline
9 Months
INTRO
An Adaptable Website With The Ability To Grow
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Reid Middleton is a civil and structural engineering company located in Everett that works with city, state, and federal governments. In order to stay competitive with other engineering company websites, they needed an update that showed their wide portfolio of work in an easy and intuitive navigation.
In 2011, me and the senior graphic designer discussed modernizing the website and after meeting with company leadership, I spearheaded the redesign and development of the new website.
GOALS
How might we create the ability to seamlessly add additional projects and services?
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In order to be successful with our task, we met with the company leadership and came up with objectives for the new website.
Updatable
Not only was the website to show our latest projects, it also had to be easily updated with newer projects as time went by.
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Informative
It had to present the latest news from the company to a visitor with ways of learning more.
Personable
We see our directors as the ambassadors to our company so we wanted to have a place to let visitors learn a little more about them.
GOALS
The Primary Users are Client Project Managers
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Through stakeholder interviews, we were able to craft together a persona of the main users of our website who would be project managers of potential clients considering hiring Reid Middleton for their project.
Joni Saffron
Project Manager - California
Frustrations
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Needs to figure out which company to hire for their project
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Company website projects might be difficult to find if present at all
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Not sure how active companies are in the industry
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Goals
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Find relevant company projects for their project
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Learn more about company’s latest activities
The Secondary Users are Subconsultants
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The secondary users of the website are subconsultants who will be researching what type of work Reid Middleton does to see if they’re suitable to partner up for a project they’re pursuing.
Paul Oregano
Senior Transportation Engineer - Washington
Frustrations
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Needs to find a good company to partner with for a project
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Has to filter through hundreds of other engineering companies
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Has trouble finding out who exactly to contact
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Goals
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Find the right company for the partnership
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Research what this company’s strengths are
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Find out who exactly to contact to hash out the details
NEW EXPERIENCE
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The goal was to create a welcoming online space for clients to visit and explore Reid Middleton’s work. The website was also to provide clients an immediate update of Reid Middleton happenings as well as immediately introducing them to a random director. It would also serve as a place to showcase past work and work we were currently working on.
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Home Page
Website visitors were keen on learning about our latest projects and initiatives. Hence we created a large hero carousel that would cycle recent new projects to show visitors what we’ve been working on.
In addition, we introduced a directors banner for visitors to be able to easily connect with to start a conversation (for a new project).
Our People
Brand credibility was an issue in the past, and hence we introduced an “Our People’s” page. Through this page visitors could not only see a photo of our directors but also a brief career description and an ice-breaker to make them personable and friendly.
Projects & Services Pages
To enable visitors to see the possibilities of working with Reid Middleton we introduced a compendium of past projects, along with a faceted navigation bar with filters that were appropriate, predictable, free of jargon, and prioritized. This would give each visitor a clear understanding of the ever updating list of individual projects per market sector.
Modular Page Functionality
The layout was also flexible enough to incorporate custom designs. This would allow each marketing team to have their own unique landing page to excite and interest customers. To build the user’s trust in the company’s expertise, a directors highlight element was added continuing the personable aspects of the website.
In The News
To further the goal of keeping visitors up-to-date with Reid Middleton news, the news page was expanded with a filter feature for specific categories of news. News items are kept for 5 years and then archived every year to not clutter the side navigation.
IMPACT
Results, & Next Steps
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This version of the website served Reid Middleton for 5+ years and was the catalyst for the WordPress version where many elements were brought over to the new platform. WordPress also allowed general marketers to easily update items and pages, rather than have a dedicated web coder.
While competitive reviews of other engineering websites provided positive leads and additions, a primary issue was the website was designed with the engineers in mind and not the clients. As a result, there are pages that engineers proposed but have been sitting unvisited, often times for years. A Google Analytics of the website would help pinpoint what pages could be merged into more visited ones or just deleted entirely. Another step would be to send surveys to clients to ask them about what they look for when visiting an engineering website.
I was very happy to have been the programmer for the old Reid Middleton website as well as contributed to the latest redesign. This project was how I learned a great deal of HTML/CSS and it’s limitations as well as a better understanding of Javascript and web design that ultimately contributed to my passion for UX
Feedback on the project? Want to discuss marketing websites or content management systems? You can find me on LinkedIn.