Centeng Ltd, based in Hessay near York, are manufacturers of gas cutting and welding equipment. Centeng approached the Cybermill to redesign and build their website.
The Brief
The current site was starting to look a little dated in its design. It was also suffering from a lack of content meaning that it did not rank well within the search engines; this was compounded by the fact that only two of the pages were actually visible to the public or the search engine ‘bots’.
Centeng Ltd wanted a site that was clean and professional, using their blue company branding. The site also needed to be available in multiple languages, specifically Dutch, German and French.
Design and Build
To fulfil the brief we created a design that was clean, using a mainly white background, with the accent colour being two shades of blue, one navy taken from Centeng’s logo and a bright blue to act as the active colour. Introducing an active colour is often a great way to add variety and depth to a design – it also gives us something to use to bring attention to parts of the site that are clickable, which helps users find their way. To add some interest to the plain white background, silhouettes of the company’s equipment have been used as a background image.
The home page features a central featured image from the Centeng factory. This gives some visual impact to the page and also shows what the company does. This image is accompanied by a statement summarising the company’s ethos.
Features
Centeng didn’t need a complete catalogue of its products on the website, but instead required a showcase of various types of product that they make. The product pages show case 5-6 images showing groups of or single products. To find out more about the products, the visitor needs to click on the image. By clicking on the image this opens a jQuery light box which shows the enlarged product image and a description of what is being shown.
We discussed the use of product images with Centeng and they decided to make use of a professional photographer to show off their catalogue in the best possible way. We have a long history of working with professional photographers thank to our photography website design company Phosys and so we were easily able to find a local commercial photographer to do the work. The end result elevates the Centeng site with crisp product shots and some really electric ‘action shots’ of the welding equipment.
The contact page features an embedded Google Map with a custom marker, to make it easier to find the Centeng Ltd Office. The company were also keen to emphasise that they manufacture all of their products in house the UK.
Multiple Languages
As the site needed to be available in different languages we constructed the site using a content management system, making it completely editable. This allowed us to incorporate a plugin that takes the content in its various language forms and shows the relevant language depending on what has been selected on the front-end of the website.
A simple ‘Switch language’ button appears at the top of each page allowing visitors to make their choice. The plugin that we used also allowed us to send off the content for professional translation so we could ensure that the website copy was completely accurate and professionally written.
