Barghausen Consulting Engineers, Inc.

Project Description

Professional Service Website Design and Development for Engineering Firm in Kent, WA

Barghausen is a multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm that’s been serving the Puget Sound region and beyond for over two and a half decades. They consult on a range of topics for commercial, industrial, and residential projects, and they offer high-quality services and customer care to each and every client. Their work has earned them a reputation for excellence, and they’ve completed projects for a number of major national chains including Fred Meyer and IKEA.

Project Objectives

At the outset of this project, Barghausen was looking to polish up and modernize the company’s web presence. They required better user flow and streamlined navigation, and they wanted us to highlight two primary areas in order to attract targeted, highly qualified leads: the portfolio and the service listings.

In addition, they wanted to leverage their website to improve talent acquisition. The website they were working with was dated and did not reflect the company’s culture and values; they were looking for something that could better showcase their “hard work, roll-up your sleeves attitude” and dedication to both their clients and their team.

Website Design and Development Successes

Barghausen is a big-time player in the engineering consultation sphere; to reflect this in their website, we incorporated a number of special features and contemporary elements into the design. The homepage masthead features a gorgeous drone-filmed video of a large-scale construction site. To add even more interest, we developed in a feature that makes it appear as though text is being typed onto the screen, then deleted and replaced with new type, all with a cursor flashing to the right of the entered text.

The design also features a ton of intelligently used white space to help accent important content areas sitewide. Lines of text scroll parallax-style alongside a number of these content areas to add interest without distracting the eye.

Elsewhere on the homepage, the Barghausen client list section features “popcorning” logos to make the best use of spatial real estate possible while gorgeous service and testimonial sliders introduce critical content while keeping the scroll down. These sliders are also user friendly—users can control them using the bright blue arrow blocks on the left (or by swiping on mobile).

The interior pages are equally bright and attention grabbing, and per the client’s request we dedicated extra special attention to the portfolio area. The portfolio overview page features a clean-lined grid that allows the photos to speak for themselves. Portfolio detail pages allow even more space for the client’s high resolution imagery, with gallery sliders taking up almost the full width of the screen. Below the gallery is a two-columned space for text blocks and project info that allow the client to go into as much or as little detail as required. The detail pages are rounded out with links off to “Related Case Studies.”

On top of the above, as a part of this project, we worked with the client on a logo redesign. Their previous logo was feeling too “busy” and—like their other web assets—out of date. Our design team’s final logo is simple but effective, with a funky clean font, strong boxed lines, and two bright colors that instantly grab the eye: vibrant blue and stark white.

Other highlights of this design include the unique, sans-serif font that’s used sitewide to make headings pop; this font face has “grip” to it and is sized extra large for better contrast with the body text. Additionally, the logo’s brilliant blue is ubiquitously employed to spotlight clickable content areas and various calls to action throughout the website, while a crisply designed “Careers” page—with sectional backgrounds that fade from white to black for even more punch—will make anyone want to submit their resume to the Barghausen team.

This webite won a 2018 AVA Digital Award: Platinum (Web-Based Production | Website | Redesign).