The Danish civil engineering and concrete contractor company Bo Michelsen A/S needed a redesign of their company’s website and contracted us for the task. We discussed and analysed the premise for the new website and arrived at the following description for the future site:

“The engineering company Bo Michelsen needs a redesign of their static website. The goal is to create a website that displays the company as a stable, local enterprise with many years of experience. The website should not be ‘fancy’ but functional and simple without being boring.

Bo Michelsen’s logo is well known in the local community of Sønderjylland and should have a prominent display on the website.

Specifically the new website should help spread the knowledge of the company to adjacent region of Midtjylland and especially target private contractors. The site should be easy to update by the people at Bo Michelsen’s office and it should be easy to add new text and pictures of projects.”

Based on this, we created a couple of paper sketches for different signature designs of the front page and continued the discussion with Bo Michelsen based on these.



They decided to go with the last of the three sketches where a simple image and navigation would lead the users relevant parts of the site. We then continued into the visual design regarding the colours, tabs and style of the site through to the next batch of PhotoShop designs.




Constructing the website
In the past, their company homepage was merely a collection of losely coupled static coded pages which required a developer to update even the simplest of tasks. To change this we decided to base their new site on the Open Source platform WordPress. WordPress is really a blogging platform but for a number of reasons it is a perfect fit for the small website Content Management System:

• Its Open source so there are no license fees required for use
  
• It contains a relatively easy templating system
• Its user-friendly – easy to learn and use compared to other content management systems
• Extendable with own or third-party plugins
  

Bo Michelsen has 15 administrative employees and about 100 masons, carpenters and workers at different client sites. They were looking for a way to easily communicate with their work force. They decided on a simple intranet solution also built with WordPress. Some of the advantages of using WordPress for intranet:

• Easy user management
  
• Password restricting access using a plugin
• Easy distribution through emails on updates
• Two-way communication through posts and comments
  

And heres the finished product: