Roots Design Workshop is a professional Architectural and Environmental design practice that provides services to isolated and remote communities.
When the co-founder of Roots Design Workshop asked us to review the design of their new website we were excited as there’s nothing better than working with talented and professional designers.
The initial designs were highly visual and would have no doubt been successful. That said we thought they were missing a trick by focussing less on what they had to show and more on what information users were looking for on each page.
The Roots team threw themselves into the strategy behind the website and developing the content that would communicate this. Within a matter of consultancy sessions we had a revised site map, copy, style guidelines and content templates for each page.
We then moved on to sketching sessions which stimulated Roots to create revised screen designs that supported all of the additional content they now had to communicate. At the end of this process they had screen designs of all core pages of the website that really put the content front-and-centre.
We never envisaged taking on a development role for this project but we loved working with Roots and truly believed in what they do. So we agreed to continue working together, at a reduced price, and they agreed to increase their project timeline in order to ensure that our shared vision came to fruition.
Though the budget was tight we managed to deliver a really tidy WordPress powered website that takes full advantage of custom post types and taxonomies. By reducing our rate and increasing the project timeline we delivered all the functional requirements that were in the scope of the project whilst maintaining the original look and feel of the site from the initial screen designs.
The result was a back-end (thanks to WordPress‘ awesome usability) that everyone understood at first glance and a front end that looks beautiful. Drag-and-drop for re-ordering the elements on a page, tick-boxes for custom lists, WYSIWYG editors and custom fields for all content blocks means Roots will have no problems maintaining their website going-forward.
We’re really proud of this website. Not just because of the end-result but because it was one of those projects that was a total joy to work on. We all had a shared vision, set of objectives and a goal. This meant that when changes occurred (which they always do) they only enhanced the final deliverable. Now it’s not often you can say that!
So check out the website and what Roots do or for more information on this project please contact us. We look forward to working with them in the future on their bold plans for a truly remote architectural practice.
