Website development – Eight new websites in seven months? No problem.
Website development – Eight new websites in seven months? No problem.
Lucy Group delivers everything from smart lighting systems to high-spec sustainable homes. As a diversified group operating in a number of sectors across 60 countries, it was inevitable their web presence included some conflicting styles and fractured pages. Our brief was not only to build Lucy Group’s corporate group website, they had seven different business units all needing new corporate sites too. The solution would need to better reflect the values of the growing business, and tell their brand story, explaining how Lucy Group’s diverse businesses slotted together. Another must-have was a user-friendly way of updating the site via the CMS.
Naturally, such a big project meant a diverse group of stakeholders. From the Executive Board to the individual business unit leaders, we needed to find an effective and efficient way of working with everyone. We started the project by running a discovery workshop with key stakeholders.
This was followed by a series of interviews with stakeholders from the different business units, including some new employees. This process proved to be incredibly valuable, not only did we gain their perspective, we also unearthed a number of differences between the business units.
Lucy Group was not in a position to share specific content with us while we developed the websites, so we ran a series of workshops using a process we’ve developed internally, ‘Content Priority Planning’. The purpose of this was to help the businesses decide what information would go on each page. We used customer personas to help define the type of content needed and then organised it accordingly. This enabled us to easily create pages and site maps for the individual websites.
For website projects, it can be easy to get caught up in the detail. This is why, in the early stages, we present our clients with rough wireframes and style tiles.
Our style tiles are a great way of exploring what a new website might feel like. They include possible fonts, colours and other UI elements and give stakeholders an opportunity to visualise it earlier on in the development process.
This approach really helped us for this project – we were able to build a consensus and it avoided surprises when we went on to develop the UI.
To ensure the design phase ran smoothly too, we used a structured process to capture online and face-to-face feedback from the many stakeholders involved. Next was our design and development handover. As part of this, we created a bespoke design system – a single source of truth for all colours, fonts and UI components (such as navigation, cards, forms etc.) which were built component by component and combined to create all the different pages. This sped up the process considerably and guaranteed a consistent use of design and code across all the websites.
Even though two of the websites required bespoke functionality (for property details and product information) and an additional site was requested which needed a different design, we successfully delivered all eight websites on schedule, within seven months.
The Lucy Group team was delighted with their new website and we received positive feedback from all the business units. Lucy Electric was extremely pleased with the number of quality leads their site generated.
We’re continuing to deliver for the Lucy Group. Torpedo is providing ongoing enhancements and we’re working on new projects together, too.
Launch website