Monarch Equestrian | West Midlands Media Web Design Portfolio

The Brief

Monarch Equestrian approached West Midlands Media for a refresh of their current site which was a few years old. The original site was neatly designed but the style was using dark colours matched with dark imagery and Monarch wanted to go with a brighter approach with much lighter imagery, a lot more white space and matched up with their main brand colour burgundy.

The information on the pages was very sparse so as part of the brief we had to offer a redesign and restructure of the pages to hold a lot more information. As they are regular users of Google Ads the service pages are now fully geared up to be the perfect landing pages, this was to help gain high-quality scores on Google Ads and be able to gain higher organic rankings too.

The Approach

As we had a very clear brief from Monarch Equestrian and they trusted our judgment for structure and exposure to search engines we did the initial design for the home page, the initial feedback was extremely positive. After a few minor tweaks to the initial design of the home page, we then designed all of the internal pages, again the feedback couldn’t be more positive with just a few minor tweaks to the internal pages.

The difference the colour change made from the previous website, and of course the images that are now daytime shots rather than night makes so much difference to the overall feel.

Branding

Monarch Equestrian already had their established brand but the company was using a few different variations, discussions then started to choose the brand logo that would be unified within the business. We were quite intrigued when we started the project to know what the butterfly in the brand represented. It turned out to be a very simple answer if you know your butterflies, Monarch is the name of a butterfly also known as the common tiger, wanderer and veined brown.

Monarch as a business now use the burgundy version of the logo and we do agree it was the best variation, it gives it a feel of quality and history which are obviously key factors in this amazing business.

Web Design

Clean, bright and structured information to entice the user into enquiring was the aim and we think every element has been fulfilled, we believe the new website really shows Monarch off as the high level company in the equestrian industry they have spent many years both achieving and sustaining.

Monarch Equestrian was designed and developed on a WordPress content management system as the staff were very familiar in the layout of the CMS and how to update it quickly, there were no off the shelf templates used here to save time. As with any West Midlands Media website no matter what the platform you get a truly bespoke solution that will stand out from the crowd!

EXPERTS IN THEIR FIELD

West Midlands Media were a friendly, professional team and are definitely experts in their field. I took over managing our website redevelopment half way through and everyone at West Mids Media helped the transition to go smoothly, nothing was to much trouble. Would highly recommend. Thank you from us here at Monarch Equestrian.

Monarch Equestrian