As Creative Director of Happy Creative, time is a constant pressure for James Chantler. Having projects completed on time and running a busy studio to the clock is all part of the job.
So, when he was challenged with coming up with an idea to design a website for one of the UK’s biggest timber merchants, time became another theme.
For a business which works round-the-clock for its customers, BSW Timber needed to engage with their visitors 24-7. From the early risers to the late night web surfers, the £300m turnover business required a website which reflected the values of the company.
The Carlisle-based business is the largest forest products company in the UK. They approached Happy Creative to completely revamp their current website, giving it a fresh look and working on the concept of the business “constantly working for you” – a concept created by James himself.
Cue a designer’s dream brief.
“Sometimes you receive a brief and an idea just sticks in your head,” says James. “And this was very much the case with BSW. They are very much a 24/7 business and I wanted to convey this in the way the website felt for the user. BSW is not just a 9-5 business and we wanted this concept to play its part in the design of the website.
“At any moment of the day BSW employees are doing their jobs, whether that be delivering logs to a timber yard across their UK bases, taking part in a marketing meeting in their headquarters or operating state-of-the-art machinery to deliver an order for one of their many customers, BSW is constantly at work.
“Happy wanted to make it clear in the design the ambitions of BSW and a clear statement that, as a business, the timber company is ever-changing to meet the demands on a dynamic customer base.”
To aid James and his design team with taking the project forward, the client had an extensive portfolio of gallery images from every aspect of their business which they wanted to use in the design of the website. The original idea, says James, was to use video but he says some of the images were so striking they had to come up with an idea of using as many of them as possible.
So, with a little bit of strategic thinking and careful planning, James’ team came up with the idea of a constantly changing homepage – a new image every minute to show BSW’s commitment to its customer.
James added: “It’s a really interesting way to demonstrate the many ways BSW work for their customer and we also tried to make sure the 24/7 theme worked within the time of the day when the user visited the site. For example, an early morning user might see logs being delivered to the yard while someone in the afternoon might see what the timber is being used to construct.
“Throughout the process we were in constant conversation with BSW, bouncing ideas off each other and making sure they were abreast of the designs we were working on. It was a pleasure to work with a client who was with us on our concept from the outset.”
