Dualite
One of the largest signage manufacturers in the US was in a dire need of revamping their ageing site to make a bold statement about their abilities and resourcefulness.
Dualite has been in the signage scene for almost a century, and is trusted by some of the top dogs in the market to produce their installations, manage their construction sites, and work on modern solutions for everything id-related.
They are one of the few companies who are really committed to reducing carbon footprint in their manufacturing process, which is always nice in my book.
They approached us at Finsweet to help with realising their project and from the start they had a few unconventional ideas as to what they'd like their new web presence to be.
Services
Concept, wireframing, prototyping, user experience and information architecture, interface design, animation, graphic design & illustrations, Webflow development.
The whole picture
The most important thing was to make sure site's structure was super simple, and prospective customers could reach any part of the site as past as possible without any hidden content.
When we started talking with guys at Dualite it was instantly obvious that the main problem their old site had was lack of proper structure, a lot of weird link loops were playing tricks with user experience, a lot of content wasn't even obviously shown and overall navigation was pretty convoluted.
Therefore the first thing was to make sure we have a proper updated sitemap with simple navigation leading everywhere from one easily accessible place (main nav, duh!).
Then we had to structure each page to be as full of important information as possible so that everything people would ever wanted to know is right there, all the time.
As everything was to be created completely inside Webflow environment, hosting included, another important thing was not to lose SEO juice while changing parking. I made sure to redirect a huge amount of old weird links to the proper ones.
The overall amount of pages went down 80%. Neat!
In terms of colours we went the combination of retro-styled muted backgrounds and bright accents accentuating the brand philosophy.
Overall the site was to be a classy dark, with bright splashes of colour where it was necessary. Gradients were used in playful animated illustrations throughout the pages.
Look And Feel
The idea that I based everything around was to make every page and every section of every page memorable and fun, without boring repetitive blocks of information. This resulted in each unique page being very distinct visually and conceptually.
A lot of site parts have interactive animations reacting to page scroll or cursor movement.
Graphics elements were done in a simple line drawing manner reminiscent of company's technical documentation.
Making things simple
As with most of my projects I used Webflow CMS to allow people from Dualite manage content in the simplest possible way even without any extensive training.
Everything on the site that would be theoretically updated from time to time was done using collections of items.
Some interesting modifications were made for the default Webflow collection behaviour to allow for cool database-driven functionality. Those readers familiar with Webflow would know the challenge.
We have also created a sophisticated careers submission process to get rid of using third party services, and making sure all prospective employees were staying inside the site environment when applying for jobs. The form submission process gathers all data, converts into a simple pdf document and sends it to HR for automatic storing.
People from Dualite were extremely pleasant to work with, and the process was smooth all the way from start to finish. 10/10 would recommend.
