Portfolio Detail | West Midlands Media

The Brief

West Midlands Media have been working with CD Aquatics now for over 11 years and Duncan has worked with Colin and Debbie for over 18 years so there is an extremely good relationship between both companies. This is the third website we have been commissioned to build for CD Aquatics, and we was extremely excited to start this project. The previous website was looking a little tired and outdated, this time we had a free reign with design which allowed us to go to town and make the site brighter, cleaner and of course add a few quirky elements to the site.

As there is a large trust element between both companies the brief really was to make the site clean, professional and welcoming to aquatic enthusiasts. The website had to be SEO friendly and offer a clear navigation and funnel to the correct products and a very simple checkout process too.

The Approach

With this project a meeting was arranged to explain the approach we would like to take and to discuss all the technical elements that required updating. From there a detailed proposal was written and once accepted we went straight into design. Firstly the homepage was designed with quirky headers, parallax elements and a clean aquatics themed style. CD Aquatics loved the home page so from there all internal pages was designed and they were welcomed as much as the home page.

Coming up with the quirky style for the banners got everybody in the office involved and we were inundated with fish related puns!

Branding

West Midlands Media developed the branding, colour palettes and font sets for the CD Aquatics brand, we love the way the fish floats on top of the CD to give the internal cut outs of the letters.

With the new website, we introduced some bright colours to the brand palette and it makes so much difference to the overall look and feel of the design.

Web Design

CD Aquatics is built on West Midlands Media’s E-Commerce platform for simplicity and ease of use, previously built on OS Commerce which was quite limiting making the end result world’s apart. The new flow of the products from initially looking to purchasing is far more intuitive to the user and has increased sales too which is amazing news and shows our approach works.

It was a great project especially working with Debbie and Colin again and we were all in agreement that the end result will really get their competition thinking about updating their websites.