About Bortolotto
Bortolotto Design Architect, based in Toronto Canada, offers full architecture and interior design services, focusing largely on public buildings, corporate interiors, private health care and private residential projects. The firm is committed to design excellence and have been recognized regionally and nationally through media and awards. All of our staff are: OAA, OAA intern architect, ARIDO member and/or LEED accredited professionals.
Problem
Although their existing website had been published and award winning there were several reasons to redesign the website. Images were not large enough and the company had just reworked its branding. Simply the architectural firm had outgrown its web presence and needed to inject new life and a higher quality easily expandable project portfolio. The work they were doing required better examples and imagery that the last version just couldn't support with its fixed frame of 800x480 (see fig 1).
Solutions
Since the site required new content and incorporating the new brand we approached this project with a clean slate - avoiding any elements from the previous website. After several design revisions and a complete turnaround on the look and feel we established the final look based on a clean, clear and simple aesthetic to satisfy the clients minimalist contemporary architectural style.
Another big requirement was to retain or improve the sites search engine ranking. This project could have been created using all flash in a fraction of the time but in order to be "search engine friendly" we combined the best of Flash and HTML and XML to construct a slick looking, photo gallery component with html copy and xml imbedded so that search engines could easily read and catalogue the key content.
Results:
The site is success today because the solutions worked and in fact the search engine results are much better than expected. The project pages provide a much clearer impression of the caliber and type of work they do and as a result the inquires they get are prequalified as to the type of clients and projects they work with. The client is pleased as the project did come in on time and on budget even with the design iteration taking a complete turnaround as it was all for the betterment of the project.
Client: Bortolotto Design ArchitectTeam Members: Tony Tullio (Direction), Mark Balson (Design), Michael Kinkaid (Programming)
Technology: ASP, XML, CSS, JavaScript/AJAX, Flash and HTML