S&EC Website Redesign

work

Nov 11

The original S&EC website, before this year’s redesign.

Soil and Environmental Consultants (S&EC) has a long history of environmental consulting—36 years, to be exact. They’re a team of professional specialists who bring a wealth of knowledge to every project. S&EC’s old website was a solid start in their early days, but time and technology marches on. Updating the website was also less user friendly than on modern CMSes, which meant that their content had slowly become out of date. They needed a new build to make it easier (and faster) to publish content.

This was where Squarespace came in. We’ve said it before, but Squarespace is a great hosted website platform. It’s reliable and comes with a wealth of well-maintained support documentation. We’ve found that clients are more likely to develop (or continue) the habit of adding new posts because the user interface makes it so easy to manage. For those reasons, and more, we decided to build S&EC’s new website on Squarespace.

Project Development

After conversations with the S&EC team about their goals for the new site, and competitor research for context, we were ready to kick off the project.

IA

We jumped in with a review of their current website, talking about competitor sites, and developing an improved Information Architecture (IA) to better reach S&EC’s growing audiences. From there, we pulled content into Google Docs to restructure, rewrite, and add to. Prepping the site structure and content drafts before we port content to Squarespace results in less editing during the website build—a win for everyone.

Brand

At the same time, we were busy applying a light-touch brand refinement to their kit of brand identity assets. A full rebrand was not in their budget this year, so we ran with a quick ship project. We made some adjustments to the S&EC logo to make it web-friendly, selected paragraph and heading fonts to match the logo, and iterated to a modernized, extended color palette.

The time we spend at kickoff is incredibly valuable. It may feel like a slow start at times, but we’ve found that being detail oriented early on in the process means we can move more swiftly into building and launching the site.

New Build

The new site features a streamlined header, with fewer links, simpler styling, and no tagline. Cleaning up just a few details in the header can quickly make your site easier to navigate and more user friendly.

The homepage (and other top-level pages) got a media-rich content overhaul: More photos to show off recent work, and more engaging content to motivate their audience to continue reading.

The services and portfolio pages expanded with new sections to provide users with focused pathways to guide users to the content that most interests them. These pages also received calls to action—an important step in making it easier for your audience to engage with you.

The Results

All our teamwork and effort paid off: S&EC was able to quickly add dozens of new portfolio pieces and write-ups before, and after, launch. We’re happy to know their team took to Squarespace swimmingly—a marker of project success! We look forward to seeing new content S&EC can now publish with ease.