Project Name: Sun Industries (www.sunindustriesco.com)
Client: Sun Industries (in-house)
Type: Web Design
Tools: PhotoshopIllustratorHTMLCSSPHPBootstrapWordpress

Redesigning the company website was one of the larger projects completed at SI. There was already a website in place that used SquareSpace for the design and hosting, but they felt it was time to try something different while having an in-house designer. I spent some time exploring ideas on SquareSpace, but in the end utilizing our own hosting would give us more control over the site and open the door for other web-based projects.

With most projects my goal is to make the client self-sufficient, so I decided to use Wordpress as the content management system. It's easy to work with and anyone in the office would be able to get up to speed on adding content or modifying the site.

Making use of post templates increased the ease of adding different types of content. The process boiled down to creating the copy, pulling needed images, and ticking a couple boxes for styling and where it's displayed. I tried to leverage as many Wordpress features as I could to make managing the site easy, so whoever was creating content wouldn't have to spend too much time when adding content.

The interesting thing about designing in-house is seeing the results of different ideas. You have access to direct feedback and analytic data to see what works and what doesn't. The traffic to the website post-redesign had a decent increase, as well as the time users would spend on the site. The amounts were close to double what they were getting with the previous site. I think the combination of regular content updates, e-mail campaigns, and search rankings helped create the traffic increase. There was also an increase in the amount of people contacting the company via e-mail and phone.