The Client

Back in the summer of 2021, a friend of mine from the world of graphic design reached out to me and said a client of his, for which he was developing some marketing materials for, was looking to have someone make some updates to their website. Being that my friend was not in the world of web design, he reached out to me for help. TrimLock was experiencing some trouble with the old website builder in getting updates completed in a timely and effective matter. They were starting to feel like their money wasn’t being spent effectively. I was happy to help and make their changes as required.

As time went on and once I had access to the backend of their old WordPress site and had a few more conversations with Keith and his team, they decided that they wanted to create an entirely brand new website that would be a better representation of their products and company. 

TrimLock Ltd. is a  family-owned and operated manufacturing facility, that focuses on innovative product designs on a broad spectrum of architectural & functional purposes for the exterior of housing buildings. 

Conceptualize

Once the decision was made by TrimLock to build a new website, we scheduled a consultation meeting to discuss what they were looking for and what I felt I could offer with the redesign. The biggest things I noticed through updating their old website were the flow of information was a little off, there was a lack of call-to-actions and little-to-no attention was given to best practices for SEO.

I also was excited to give the website a more dynamic design. The old design consisted of old, low-resolution photos and very little use of colour or good formatting to really draw attention to important information. Their logo had some great contrasting and unique colours – so this would be the perfect opportunity to create something that looked good and improved their traffic with better SEO practices. 

Create

As with all my design projects, I start by pulling out any relative branding information from the available resources. This includes colours, font choices and overall look and feel. From there I designed the Wall Cladding page first, as I felt it would give the best opportunity to show Keith and his team the direction I would be headed. Once I had the approval of the direction. Iwas headed, I created the rest of the product pages and finished off with the homepage design.

For each page, I started with a cool hero section at the top complete with TrimLock’s logo, large formatted headings and a CTA button to direct people to the quote section. From there it was about laying out the information in the best order and supporting it with some new imagery provided by the client. Buttons links to informational PDFs were created in the orange found in their logo to really draw attention to them. After that, I used the blue in their logo as a background colour to separate sections and custom-designed some icons for each application their products work for. Finally, a large section dedicated to the features of their products using a bullet-style list and a graphically-designed background image that was similar to the interlocking nature of the TrimLock product and a small 6 picture gallery of each product was used to show the product in action.

The final creative decision was to avoid building a “Contact Us” page by creating a custom footer that included a custom contact form and all relevant contact information required. This would help keep the costs within budget by keeping the page count down. The footer was supported by a custom header including links to email, phone and address – as well as a menu. 

Communicate

The final design is probably one of the designs that I am most proud of. I love the overall look and feel of the site. The information is presented in a clear, concise manner – with SEO-friendly text hierarchy and eye-popping colours. The new imagery and customized graphics I created supports the overall design perfectly.

The design is very modern, mobile-friendly and should rank well within search engines. The final piece of communication was to integrate Google Analytics and Search console into a newly TrimLock-owned Google account, as prior to this their old marketing firm was in control of that data. Moving forward, Keith and his team now have direct access to website data about their visitors, which will help them make decisions to best serve their customers and business.