A Better Website For Better Beef

The Canadian Hereford Association were overwhelmed by their old, outdated site that was inundated with a large amount of pages, confusing navigation, offlinked sites and a difficult to maintain environment. They approached Sland Studios with the goal to refresh their site with their new and improved branding and wished to implement an easy to update, but still customized, backend environment. They were also hoping to include an easy to view (and update) “Marketplace”, that emulated their print/digital catalogue, allowing users to view animal data in a “shop-like” and online environment.  Another key challenge we helped the client to overcome was customizing a form process for some of their key user forms; upgrading a manual process to a digital one. In addition to this work, Hereford had many key pages with historical information, important to the brand, that had to be carried over to the new site.

After a thorough site audit, we produced a revised sitemap to simplify and optimize user navigation. We worked with the client to identify key pages that they considered “high traffic”, and important to the brand. We then produced Wireframes of these key pages, that were created to outline the various elements of each key landing page. This is done to optimize user flow and achieve their key conversion/engagement goals. We then passed these “blueprints” to the design phase, where we made visualisations of these pages by incorporating the client’s branding, colours and fonts. We then began the development of the site. To address the forms identified for digitizing, our teams went back and forth on many custom options and ultimately settled on a combination of custom coded forms and landing pages connected to a Docusign™ form, to achieve the unique conditional formatting the client was hoping for in each case.

Throughout our process, we had many key milestone meetings to discuss outstanding items, progress, deliverables, roadblocks, feedback and requirements. Our team provided a custom backend environment, utilizing the client’s specific terminology and unique industry workflows. We provided and implemented many rounds of revisions and feedback from the client, ultimately, to achieve the client’s goal for user experience and efficiency.

Utilizing WordPress, we were able to bring the designs – created in the preliminary phase – to life, as well as incorporate a couple key, custom features to achieve all the goals of this website. We incorporated a custom “Marketplace” that allows the client to easily populate the template based page with animal information as well as integrate the corresponding iFrame, defined by the client simply by adding the correct url on the backend. We identified key areas on their website that they were updating frequently in many locations and opted to make these areas “dynamic”, allowing the client to only have to update in one instance to address all.

The hidden gem to this website is the customization we included on the backend of the website to mimic the industry language and verbiage of their frontend equivalents. In some cases, like in the Canadian Hereford Association, the most interesting or custom parts of a website can be what the user cannot see.

Webiste audit • informations architecture and hierarchy • website layout design • Content Management System (CMS) Integration • mobile-first responsive website development • custom form coding • third-party events • iFrame/API integration • website hosting configuration and monitoring • committee correspondence • website training for client team • security • backups & disaster testing • and ongoing support & optimization.