Engaging visitors through a seamless user experience

With a focus on community, business, arts and history, the Piece Hall came to us as they needed a brand new bespoke website design and build.

We were tasked with focusing on three specific areas of the work that the Piece Hall is involved with:

• Culture – including events and private hire.
• Heritage – including tours and the history of the local area, as well as the history of the Piece Hall itself.
• Marketplace – including the wide range of shopping and restaurants with which the Piece Hall partners.

When it came to the initial goals of the project, the team at the Piece Hall wanted to prioritise the user experience for both customers and internal team members.

There were also a few additional features that the Piece Hall team wanted their new site to include:

• A platform that would allow users to explore all the shops and make purchases
• A platform which could  host videos and stream events
• Virtual Tours of the commercial spaces to support selling (via Matterport)

First things first, our web and project management teams spent time working closely with the client on a thorough project brief to ensure we captured the goals and what they needed from their new website. This included a reviewed and revamped sitemap and navigation to create a clear, segmented user journey that was so important to the client. To do this, we split the navigation into three distinct sections – Culture, Heritage and Marketplace.

We created two key design concepts and drew up draft designs based on these – one was a highly traditional, classic theme, while the other took a significantly more modern approach compared to the other site concept and the existing Piece Hall site. The client chose to run with the more modern concept, at which point we got to work designing the internal pages of the website.

During the next step of the process, we carried out various presentations and went through rounds of feedback with the client to ensure we created designs that they genuinely loved. Once we had approval from the client on the design of the internal pages, we began to build the site, first working on the Heritage side before moving on to Culture and the Marketplace.

We created an easy-to-use, lightweight, bespoke page builder to allow the Piece Hall team to quickly and easily update their own site, without any need for Embryo to intervene in the future. The new Piece Hall website is fully editable by the client. Finally, we went through a variety of different testing stages prior to the site launch, in order to ensure a smooth transition to their brand new Piece Hall website.