Eamon Costello (Kerry) Ltd has built some of the best-known heritage and public projects in the south-west of Ireland. Their old website, a 2015 layout, led with a slideshow and a row of accreditation logos. The buildings barely appeared.
Start with what is being sold
A main contractor is appointed on the strength of its past work, so the redesign puts the projects first. Every project has its own page with the facts a procurement reader looks for: client, value, timeframe, location, size, architect, engineer and surveyor. Those fields are edited by the office in Apricot Manage; the page renders from the record, so nothing is retyped and nothing drifts.
Projects are grouped into ten sectors, each with a listing page, and the home page shows the newest work across all of them. It can never go stale, because a project published today is on the home page today.
The design
The concept is the drawing sheet: hairline rules, wide-tracked labels, tabular figures, and the boxed title block from the corner of an architect's drawing holding each project's facts. One accent colour, drawn from the existing mark and darkened until it is safe as text. Everything else is quiet so the photographs do the talking.
What the redesign found
Rebuilding a site means reading all of it, and that turned up a list of faults the old site had carried for years: a phone number with a stray digit, a copyright frozen at 2024, a careers page whose only live vacancy was hidden by a stray class, and a sub-contractor application form that could never submit. All fixed in the rebuild.
Underneath
Listings that used to be fetched by the browser after the page loaded are now rendered on the server, so search engines finally see the projects. The site gained a real sitemap and proper 404 pages. And it is animated, lightly, with a switch to review it plain.