This launch was a long time coming. We have been working with Jack Thomson over at Thomson Equipment for many months. We are happy to say the wait is over and we are all very pleased with the results.

Design Brief

After a face to face meeting with the client it became obvious that Thomson Equipment was in desperate need of an update to their old site. The background did not repeat properly, the images were dated, and many of the links went nowhere.

The Before Shot

Not to mention the fact that Thomson Equipment weren’t tracking visitors to their site. We set up preliminary tracking software and Jack nearly fell out of his chair when he heard how many hits he was getting on his site. The problem is many visitors were so turned off by the site and the difficult navigation they left as soon as they entered. We knew we needed a simple site that was easy to navigate but still had some “pop” to keep visitors on the site.

The solution

Once we had a good understanding of the problem and we dove right into our design process We sent Thomson Equipment several concepts to look over:

Initial passes at layout and color schemes

I thought the black option was the winner, but surprisingly Jack liked the blue version the best. He really appreciated the thought that went into creating a web site that was different than his competitors.

We went back to the drawing board and pieced together a few of the features we liked from both concepts. Ultimately we ended up with the final version that won Jack’s approval. We went with a blue and yellow theme to highlight the fact that Thomson Equipment deals very heavily in Cat heavy equipment. The classic yellow color of Cat tractors was an important inspiration in this work.

The final site uses a lot of jQuery to add visual interest and help keep the navigation simple and easy to use. Thomson Equipment has a lot of heavy equipment inventory. It was challenging to develop an efficient way to browse a lot of equipment at once and I think we settled on a good balance between rapid scrolling through the equipment and using jQuery to load larger images for a more detailed view.

The final site turned out great. The colors and the theme really set this site apart from its competition. I hope you enjoy it too, feel free to let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.