Pacific Renovations Website

Computer, Tablet, Phone that displays Pacific Renovaions Landing Page

Overview

Pacific Renovations is a general construction and landscape design firm based in San Jose, CA that specializes in beautiful home renovations, architectural design, and landscape design. Their online presence needed an update that would reflect the quality of the work they produce.

My Role

I was the sole owner of the project. I conducted client interviews, reorganized the information architecture, sorted through and optimized an archive of photos, redesigned the website, and developed a custom WordPress theme.

    Challenges

  • Website was static and hardcoded, so it could not be updated by company employees
  • Website was not responsive
  • Project photo galleries were scattered among different pages, causing confusion about where to go to look at examples of work
  • Navigation menu items with similar titles further confused users about where to look for certain things
  • The appearance of the website was outdated, having not been changed in roughly twelve years

    Solutions

  • Develop the website within a content management system (WordPress) for easy updateability
  • Optimize website for mobile and tablet
  • Restructure the information architecture to increase usability, getting rid of overlapping content and creating a concise and intuitive navigation menu
  • Build a custom WordPress theme that is modern and inline with the Pacific Renovations brand, utilizing their red, white, and blue color scheme with a subdued approach
Laptop screen showing landing page of Pacific Renovations website before the redesign
Before
Laptop screen showing landing page of Pacific Renovations website after the redesign
After

Process

I started by reorganizing the information architecture. Since the focus of the new website would be to showcase projects so that potential clients of Pacific Renovations could see their work, the navigation was simplified to include “About”, “Projects”, and “Services & Resources”.


The client’s contact info is at the bottom of each page, as they wanted to be sure it was always accessible rather than needing to go to a separate “Contact” page.

Snapshot of Pacific Renovations website that shows the footer at the bottom of the page

I went through the process of omitting certain information that was unnecessary and combining some that was redundant. Wireframes were then drawn up to pass along to the client. Once approved, these were turned into high fidelity mockups for each page.

Mockup of Pacific Renovations landing page Another mockup of Pacific Renovations landing page

I coded the skeleton of the custom WordPress theme to set the foundation of the website, then set out to work on each individual page. “Advanced Custom Fields” was utilized to give the client even more control over their site with relative ease. This allows for an easy way to add projects, images, photo galleries, and content on nearly every page.