As a nuclear engineering firm, their clients include both companies looking for contractors, as well as subcontractors themselves. This made it crucial to develop and structure content in a way that would satisfy the needs of both sides of their industry. Hukari had an existing website, but wanted to upgrade with a modern look and feel and take advantage of responsive design so their clients can find information about them on any device.
10for2 partnered with Erickson Digital to help HukariAscendent with their web project.
Style Guide
Although HukariAscendent already had a great logo and color scheme established for their brand, there was lots of opportunity for creativity with their new website. 10for2 created a website style guide to display potential fonts, colors, and web components so the client could offer insight into the design process. The style guide allowed us the ability to show off multiple design principles in a controlled, selective way. As the design process grew, we continued to tweak the style guide until we had a consensus on all the necessary component to build out the site. The result was a clear design path that enable a rapid site build.
WordPress Web Development
10for2 and Erickson Digital decided to move Hukari’s website onto the WordPress platform. This allowed us to build the site in a way that the office staff would easily be able to update themselves. We used comprehensive contact forms to handle the resume submission process for their potential subcontractor hires. And, we were able to integrate their existing job opportunities software into the new site to link them together for easy tracking.
Custom Website Functionality
One of the requirements of the build was to create a way for Hukari to display their projects. They wanted their clients to be able to see their previous work as well as current projects with posted job oppotunities. 10for2 utilized WordPress custom post types and some custom search functionality to handle the process.
The backend of the site shows distinct fields for Hukari staff to fill out, with no need to use HTML or shortcodes commonly found on the WordPress backend. It’s the true definition of “fill in the blank”, and the project displays uniformly on the frontend upon publishing.
The front end search functionality allows site visitors to filter down by service, project type, or region. It’s responsive to any device and looks familiar to anyone that’s shopped online and used variable filters. It also uses AJAX to load each project, so there’s no wait while filtering and searching.
Search Engine Optimization
As Hukari already had an existing website, it was important to make sure all their indexed links resolved to a page on the new site. There were a few dozen pages that no longer existed so server side redirects were used to tell search engines where the content had moved. This helped clean up their indexed pages as well as maintain page rank for their remaining content. We also implemented a variety of techniques for image optimization, page caching, and resource minification to reduce load time and increase page speed. These are just a few of the ways we fine-tuned the site to help increase Hukari’s search relevance.
Screenshots
