Weaver Architects

Project Description

Dynamic Website Design and Development for Seattle-Based Architecture Firm

Since 2005, Weaver Architects has been designing innovative and award-winning interiors for commercial and public sector spaces. Always striving for excellence, the Weaver team takes a collaborative approach to each of their projects, placing client needs and goals at the forefront of their design process.

When they approached us about revamping their website, they were looking to modernize their online presence and have it optimally reflect their company’s mission and culture. We’ve long been in partnership with their team—they’ve even designed some of efelle’s own interior office spaces—so naturally, we were excited to be a part of their website redesign project.

Project Objectives

We centered of our Weaver redesign efforts on creating a dynamic online space that their team could use to display the best of their interior design and architecture work while promoting their dedication to collaboration with their clients.

We were also tasked with consulting on improving their website’s architecture as they sought to provide visitors with a more intuitive and fluid user experience.

Website Design and Development Achievements

To honor the mission of adding a sense of modernity to Weaver website design, we opted to carry their brand’s steel-blue color palette throughout the site, complementing it with large blocks of bright white space and elegant hues of gray. We also brought in bold sans-serif fonts, and we varied sectional background colors between white and deep charcoal, adding a kick of contrast to make each informational space stand out.

To improve user navigation while maintaining the design’s air of sophistication, our team built in a six-tiled hamburger menu that opens up to a full-screen view on click and introduces users to all the major areas of Weaver’s site. This low-profile main navigation solution is intuitively placed and does not detract from other design elements on the page. It also gains a circular background as users scroll past the masthead to ensure that it’s always visible and available regardless of where a user may land on a given page.

As with all our new projects, we built the Weaver website to be responsive across all devices. If users that access the site from a smartphone, they will be treated to an equally clean design wherein elements stack attractively on top of one another—all information and vital imagery will remain available to all users while the Weaver team only needs to update these spaces once in their content management system.

On a related note, our team designed and developed the Weaver site on FusionCMS, a flexible and fully custom content management system that was built with UX principles in mind to make website updates a cinch.

This was a particularly critical piece for Weaver’s portfolio area. Fusion makes its easy for the Weaver team to view and change out project photos and details—no coding necessary. Adding new projects is only a few clicks away, with each appearing in consistent form on the front end.

Fusion also makes it easy for us to add portfolio filtration options to the front end, improving visitors’ experiences with the site as they are able to toggle between different views via UX-friendly drop-down menus. On the portfolio overview page—which features a dynamic Pinterest-style floating grid and lots of appealing white space—users can also enter search criteria to hone in on projects appropriate to their needs to a quick and easy manner.

The portfolio detail pages feature full-screen high resolution masthead images of the project in question; users can toggle between different photos in the gallery using navigation dots on the right-hand side of the page. Large information spaces are available below, as is the opportunity for users to share each page on their social media accounts—this is not only a win for user engagement, it also benefits Weaver from an SEO perspective as it encourages more backlinks to their website.