Walsh Bishop is a mid-sized architectural firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their site launched a little over a year ago. I worked on it with a great team at Larsen Design, but left to take a position at HK before it went live. This site was the result of a great, close working relationship with the client. I designed the site as well as put together a lengthy research document which included competitor’s sites, audience demographics, various users paths, and a ‘connectivity’ section about the company blog. Looking back on it, even though that research is only 2 years old (and still applicable), the web was in a pretty different place back then. ‘Connectivity’ would now be called ‘Social Media’ and I’m sure it would have been a mandatory part of the project, rather than something that was fresh, new, and a little scary for the client.
With that said, Walsh Bishop has done a great job of keeping the site current. They’ve added new projects, a whole new Housing portfolio section, and kept the blog up to date. The entire site was built on the WordPress platform so that most of these updates they’ve been able to implement themselves.
One of the largest challenges was the fact that the company was going through a rebranding at the same time. The site was scheduled to launch before the new identity did, so they did not want to use their logo on the site. The solution came by integrating the name seamlessly into the primary navigation. It functioned as the link back to the homepage making it not a logo and more a piece of functionality.
