HDowns are an Iron Foundry based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
To celebrate their 70th year a new website and branding was commissioned, communicating the company's expertise and quality manufacturing.
The Challenge
Elevate and strengthen the HDowns Brand, celebrate company heritage, communicate industry experience and service offering to drive new business.
Brand Identity
Branding discussions were opened at the earliest opportunity. Typical of many SMEs, the absence of master artwork had resulted in the logo and typeface morphing into numerous incarnations, both on and offline.
We moved forward to clarify and consolidate the logo design, colour palate and typeface, producing guidelines and a clear position from where we could inform the wider web design.
Discovery
With the decline of heavy manufacturing in the UK, this was a golden opportunity to celebrate a success story; championing the craftsmanship and true grit of the modern day foundry.
Understanding the process from elemental materials, through to the intensity of the blast furnace and drama of casting itself proved interesting and insightful.
As part of the discovery we took the opportunity to talk through processes and photograph various stages of production to get a good feel for the business.
Tapping the Cupola; molten Iron flows into the ladle
Review, Structure, Engage
The existing site content lacked organisation, having grown organically over the years without structure or thought to navigation.
Much of the site traffic came through organic search results to pages with inconsistent or confusing navigation leaving the viewer disorientated, contributing to bounce rate and potential loss of custom.
To better engage the largely B2B audience we created a plan to deliver a modern site that reflected on the past but looked to the future.
Review and rework existing content where possible, to better communicate core services
A ground up redesign of the user experience and interface design
Create intuitive and clear navigation across mobile and desktop devises
Design Solution
Responsive Design
Certain types of content created challenges for mobile users, in particular the large material specification data tables.
We employed responsive tables allowing viewers to navigate table data intuitively and made for an elegant solution.
Left - responsive tables (scrolling table with fixed 1st col) Center and Right - discrete navigation controls
Icons
To help personalise and develop the site style a bespoke set of icons were created to communicate key messages.
Pixel perfect icons
Bespoke icon set
Datasheets
From web analytics we observed the materials pages were broadly the most popular through niche search terms and specifications.
To monopolise on this, using InDesign, we produced a series of datasheets to accompany the material standards, which users could download and print.
International Standards Datasheet
Build & Launch
The responsive website design was rapidly developed using Bootstrap. Regular review points were set throughout the build where feedback was discussed and actioned to meet the wider project goals.
