This year we had the pleasure of working with Stone Soup Concrete.
While Stone Soup had a nicely designed website up already, unfortunately, it was not mobile friendly. With Mobile media consumption rising astronomically (here's some statistics on the current trends), they correctly saw this as a problem going forward for their business.
Design
Our first order of business was a slight adjustment to the design to create a new responsive site. We made a great effort to keep the simple, clear and bold aesthetic of the previous version with some updates. For example, inserting an Instagram feed was a simple way to keep the content on the homepage interesting and varied, which took advantage of under-promoted content that was already being created. Additionally, they desperately needed their portfolio and photo viewer redesigned, as it was pretty busted.
Rhyme used the app Flinto to create an interactive mock-up of our proposal. Once we agreed on the new design, we moved forward with the more technical side of things.
SEO
Stone Soup had an excellent amount of interesting and unique content, which is exactly what Google likes when it's deciding which sites it prefers in its ranking. In the transition, we paid special attention to keeping their Google position where it was. While some sections of the site would need to be combined with others and/or adjusted for the new format, we made sure to find a home for everything they had, so as to keep them up top.
Server fun!
Like many businesses, Stone Soup found themselves unhappily tied to an unruly server and hosting situation that quickly became a real stumbling block to even updating the site. Over the years, we've dealt with many clients that have had similar issues. It can often seem harder to sort out hosting and server issues than just starting over on a new site, especially when your main focus is running your business day to day. Fortunately, we were able to help them transition to a shiny new server - one which they can easily interact with and which will allow them to not only use their site, but also expand it as the need presents itself.
This was the type of project that sits firmly in our comfort zone (in a good way!). We know how to get sites responsive and responding to their owners, and the guys at Stone Soup are fantastic to work with. We were especially pleased to work with another company in Easthampton (our home town!) and to help them turn an internet headache into a digital dream. Check out their beautiful work (and ours!) on their new responsive website.
