Overview

The team at Ward-Henshaw felt it was time to revamp their old website. It was an outdated WordPress site that simply no longer reflected their work and was a bit off-putting to maintain. Having designed and built another of MHA’s subsidiary websites, Ward-Henshaw tasked Block 81 with creating a very similar site that did a better job of showing off the projects they work on.

Client: Ward-Henshaw
Project Type: Company Website
Services: UI design, WordPress to Craft CMS migration, website hosting
Year: 2021

Exploration

Although it was clear that a full information architecture phase was overkill, we did still work on the high-level structure in the form of a site map. This helped make things clear for everyone involved in the project, including, if not especially, the Ward-Henshaw team. This was also fundamental in helping us determining a good Author Experience (AX) for the back-end of the content management system the site was to be built on.

Design

Knowing that the overall look and feel was going to be incredibly similar to one of Ward-Henshaw’s sister companies, P&C Construction, we all agreed a full design phase was not necessary. Instead, we used the sister company website as our foundation and went straight into code. That said, we didn’t just copy and paste code!

Even though we wrote the code for P&C, several years had already passed and, if you know anything about web technology, it changes fast. So we opted to take advantage of newer coding methods including Tailwind CSS. Using Tailwind CSS allowed us to build the site a bit faster than normal which was important for this project.

Craft CMS

Although WordPress had served Ward-Henshaw well for some time, it was time for something a bit more robust and a more user friendly back-end. Additionally, since there’d be primarily one person managing the various web properties for MHA Resource Company, it made sense to use the same CMS (separate installations were needed however) that P&C Construction uses for familiarity and because the content structure was going to be so similar. What this ultimately means for a content author is fewer barriers and mental switching had we gone with a completely different CMS.

Results

Ward-Henshaw's new website is straightforward, more in line with their brand, and runs on a robust CMS that makes it much easier to manage content.