Project Description
Project Brief
Chateaux, a technology professional services organization that’s been in business for over 30 years, wanted to update their look and feel to align more with current design trends, and to better enable current and future clients to understand the full scope of Chateaux’s capabilities and experience.
As part of this site update, Chateaux needed better tools for their business users to edit website content for delivery across all devices.
Chateaux engaged Stormhold to help with its brand message, and this included website design as well as overall digital marketing strategy. The result is that Chateaux is now better positioned to engage current and potential clients in a way that fully promotes its value proposition across industries and technologies!
Views of the Old Site
After the Responsive Redesign
Approach
After the Brand Research and Analysis was complete, it was clear that the “Chateaux Software” name implied that Chateaux had software for sale, but that is not the case.
Chateaux is a technology professional services firm. So, a (slight) name change was in order, along with a modified logo design and new typeface sets.
Understanding that trade conferences, dinners and other social events are core venues for Chateaux where the smart phone that rules the day, it was vital that folks interested in Chateaux should be able to view capabilities immediately and with ease.
Therefore, a new, sleek responsive design was an obvious mandate, but keeping the original customized images was a key requirement that would help to minimize rework. And so, the Stormhold team created a color theme that hued to that of the original site, but extended the color characteristics to play well with newer devices.
Robust usability testing on numerous platforms, ensuring a consistent experience, was a must. The Stormhold team used every trick and tool to give the site a great experience across all devices and browsers.
Finally, implementing a Content Management System (CMS) was a key foundational strategy. Previously, Chateaux utilized a CMS for its blog, but that was it, and all other content on the site (job posts, services pages, case studies) was coded and maintained manually, and as an IT responsibility, this was a significant bottleneck.
Capabilities Employed
Beautiful Design
Chateaux now sports a greatly improved look and feel, but with a new retro-techno edge!
The entire site, with its CMS, is easily updated by the various groups at Chateaux (and Stormhold) and continuously refreshed with new content.
Navigating the site, whether on a desktop or an iPhone, is easy and enjoyable, with “One Page Love” as its guiding principle.
And the case studies, which had previously been downloadable only as PDFs, are now interactive – a joy to read and reference!
Excellent Results
The feedback from Chateaux’s clients (and to Stormhold) has been tremendous!
As a firm that garners most of its business from referrals (and previous client work), Chateaux, with its new site, has seen a dramatic increase in new opportunities, thanks in part to its ability to raise awareness more directly, and at the point of need.
According to Ken Zimmerman, Chateaux’s president, “The new site that Stormhold created is phenomenal! I was thrilled at how the Stormhold team basically read my mind. I’m pretty hard to please, but as soon as I saw it, I was, like, ‘Wow!’”
