What we offer our clients can be distilled down to two things: our process and skills as developers. When those two are joined well, our sites become solutions rooted in real needs; not over-engineered or lacking in thought. They become code with context. We wanted our new site's design and structure to reflect this combination of offerings.
A key goal of the site was to place the focus on our clients. We wanted to highlight how they achieve their goals through solutions we've partnered to create. Each of our case studies showcase how our client centric process, paired with the solutions we build, enable our clients to crush their organizational goals. We find that we are able to delight our clients most when we take the time to learn and understand their needs. Those needs then guide us through Strategy + Design, Development, and the Evolution of their site. The structure of our new site was built with our process at the forefront.
The Design
We are developers first and foremost and we are not ashamed of how geeky we can be. One of the goals with our site's design was to convey that we are technical solutions providers. From the typeface we used, to the punchy but bold colors, to the angles throughout, we wanted things to feel calculated, precise, and confident. Rachel, a producer at Cascade, referred to it as "geek chic," which couldn't describe it better.
Along with this new design direction, we decided it would be the perfect time to freshen up our almost 20-year-old logo. The previous logo, which you will still see around the railcar, drew inspiration from the power symbol creating the letters CWD. The new shape still creates the letters, but moves away from the round power symbol to instead be flanked by angle brakets which are used in many coding languages.Accessibility
Our goal in building a new site was to make it as accessible as possible, following current guidelines and drawing from our latest knowledge about developing and structuring sites for people spanning all abilities. We created the backend and designed the frontend with these accessibility standards top of mind, and used every evaluation tool we could track down (including an excellent one from Microsoft that was released during development). The result, we hope, is a site that is delighful to use for everybody.Our Admin Tools
Every one of the sites we build is created using Evergreen, the content management system we've build from the ground up. Evergreen allows us to create custom tools unique to every site, since each of our clients have different needs. One thing that we have in common with many of our clients, however, is our limited capacity. Being a professional services company, our own website can become neglected (as we're ironically building and evolving websites for others). Knowing this, we wanted to build a straightforward, low maintenance, and well-organized site that allows our team the ability to worry less about it. That meant that it needed to be easy to update and have the ability to evolve with little effort. We've found that our Content Blocks system is the perfect solution to accomplish this. Content Blocks allow us to have an organized and easy-to-use admin interface with the ability to flexibly create unique pages, posts, and case studies. Additionally, if any one element becomes stale and begins to look dated, we can easily update one block instead of needing to revamp the whole site.Interested in hearing more?
We'd be happy to share more about the thought process we went through in designing and building our new site. Get in touch!