MRL Design is a unique Liverpool Interior Design and FFE Consultancy, specialising in Architectural Planning, Design, Refurbishment and Construction.
We met Jennie from MRL when this great little company was just starting out. One of the first tasks that we undertook for MRL was to create a complete brand identity and a suite of marketing collateral. The next stage for the company was to create a dynamic portfolio website to showcase their designs, and to use as a hub to drive new businesses.
MRL chose Studiowide because we’d been there from the very start. We had already demonstrated our capabilities in creative and strategic marketing, I think our enthusiasm of working with start-ups also shone through and we were really grateful to be also offered the project of design and developing the brand new website.
Challenges
When positioning yourself as a creative company, it requires that extra special care and attention to develop something that is going to be used as a platform to showcase your creative abilities.
This was the challenge for MRL Design. The company needed to promote themselves as a creative, interior design company – keeping copy content to a bare minimum, whilst also serving the purpose of potentially generating new enquires.
The technical requirements were actually quite straight forward, as the majority of the focus was on the portfolio display. One other requirement was to keep the hierarchy to a minimum and preferably do this all in a single page website.
Single page websites are a great way to allow a company “story” to unfold, as the user scrolls down. However, it is quite challenging to build depth and clickable content in these pages, such as portfolio and news items.
When positioning yourself as creative company, it requires that extra special care and attention when developing something that will be used a platform to showcase your creative abilities.
Solution
We selected WordPress for the Content Management System as we knew that any scalability required in the future could be accommodated quite easily via the vast array of plugins and extensions available in the WordPress marketplace.
We built the single page site starting with a main scrolling image banner, and then populated with animated “fly-in” sections of content, which were revealed as the user progressed down the page.
The portfolio section was also built into the page and featured an animated modal/popup that activated the portfolio assets. These were then filtered using a simple button filtering system.
Results
We created an elegant website that, whilst having a lot of content, it’s served up to the viewer only at the right point of when they need it. The result of this is that content and image clutter is kept to a minimum.
The client loves the sleek design which is now the perfect platform they can use to showcase their designs and help them towards the next chapter in their business.
