Grafton Group Plc | Civils & Lintels | Urban Element
WHAT WE DO

Providing adaptive, flexible and creative opportunities to capable national supplier

Civils and Lintels are one of the premier distributors of lintels, drainage and civils materials in the UK and have a dedicated national network of strategically placed branches, supported by their sister company PDM in Scotland. Civils and Lintels originally came across Urban Element when looking for a web development agency that could help create their new website. During this search, Urban Element was kindly recommended by Grafton Merchanting, an umbrella group responsible for Beaumont Forest, a previous long term web design and digital marketing client of ours.

Improving core functionality for customers and employees

Civils and Lintels came to us looking for a new brochure website that would offer their customers a simple, intuitive and user friendly experience. It was important to make quote requests, large quantity orders and product information easily accessible to their audience whilst remaining easily adaptable for their employees. The move to WordPress was an important and pivotal decision for Civils and Lintels due to their team having previous internal knowledge of the platform. This transition to a new content management system aimed to provide their internal resources with adaptive, flexible and creative opportunities to manage the site in ways that were simply not practical before.

Mission

To revitalise the look, feel and core functionality of their site whilst maintaining their core brand image.

Pairing strong visuals with optimised functionality to improve user journeys

During the design process, Civils & Lintels came prepared with a rough plan and design of the new website they were looking for us to produce. These introductory visuals really helped our team further understand the look and feel Civils & Lintels wanted achieve. With their designs and vision strongly in mind, our development team began work on improving their visuals in order to meet their ambitious needs. During this process, we wanted to ensure the overall look and feel remained in tune with the branding featured across the Buildbase brand.

Improving usability and system security whilst maintaining brand values

With visual branding being of utmost importance to Civils & Lintels, we wanted to ensure their strong nationally recognisable branding paired well with the new and improved functionality proposed. With performance, site security and internal usability being high on the agenda, we approached the build with new architecture, custom code and minimal plugins to help maintain maximum performance. With Civils & Lintels keen for their team to have back office access, our development team planned out and designed the backend of the interface to make internal site updates a support an effortless process for employees and specialists alike.

Visually refreshed architecture for desktop, mobile and tablets

When designing the overall site architecture for Civils & Lintels, there were many elements that needed our attention in order to produce a fully functioning site. We started this process by redesigning and reconfiguring their main mega menu, product categories and left hand navigation menu, with our sights set on improving user experience and product discovery.

With optimised digital traffic more important than ever before, it was essential for Civils & Lintels to be built from the ground up with SEO and mobile usability in mind. For both our digital marketing and development teams, it was fundamental to include a strategically planned SEO sitemap, alongside many visually refreshed touch elements for mobile and tablet users.

Increasing enquiries, branch awareness and product visibility

With increased enquiries and branch awareness being one of the many performance indicators behind Civils & Lintels new website, restructuring the branch locator was essential. The new and improved branch locator design makes local branch enquiries clear and easy. Our development team have also implemented this feature within the product pages so that customers and identify the nearest branch with stock and begin a conversation via email.

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