Breakhouse
Breakhouse is an industry leader in retail and hospitality interior design and architecture. They have designed beautiful spaces for businesses across North America focusing on developing dynamic consumer experiences and bringing brands to life. Breakhouse has its own excellent in-house design team, so they partnered with alltimelowe to consult on the user experience and design for their new site and for the development of a new WordPress site.
Easy to work with and efficient with time
— Peter Wünsch, Partner & Creative Director
Overview
Since 2000 Breakhouse has been designing experiences and communications that connect brands with their consumers. Their website has taken on a few forms over that period, from an Adobe Flash-based website to a portfolio managed through Adobe, these website solutions failed to give Breakhouse the level of control over their content they required and a user-friendly means of managing it.
Breakhouse had partnered with Kula Partners, my former employer, a local agency specializing in marketing and sales enablement, to help determine the new direction for Breakhouse’s market positioning, while their internal team was keen to begin designing. As we met to discuss the project we were able to collaborate and iterate to find the ideal solution for Breakhouse’s website needs.
Process
Alltimelowe took on the role of design consultation in the early stages of the project, offering expertise and insight into the user experience while Breakhouse’s internal team began developing an information architecture and wire-frames. As these wire-frames became more concrete the design team moved on to the visual design with alltimelowe again consulting on best practices, user interface, and reminding the designers of considerations for a responsive website.
The development began with translating the visual design language developed by Breakhouse into a WordPress theme, with custom development for functionality beyond WordPress’s default offering. We developed custom post types for portfolio pieces that allowed for a dynamic display of projects, a careers section for hiring needs, a team section to highlight the leadership and a resources section to integrate with HubSpot for inbound marketing.
Outcomes
The end result of this collaborative process is a stunning website that loads quickly presents visually rich content, and serves Breakhouse’s business objectives. The website looks great across a diverse range of devices and screen sizes and we are committed to continuing our relationship to continuously improve upon the website.
The previous versions of the website didn’t have analytics reporting, so it is difficult to measure improvements. However, a few key metrics look good. Site-wide, the bounce rate is hovering around 43%. According to Brafton for a B2B site, the average is 61%, so Breakhouse is doing well. Visitors are also viewing 2.8 pages per session, also a good indicator that people are engaged and exploring the website.
Breakhouse is now fully equipped to manage their content on their own; alltimelowe provided a training session and accompanying documentation on using WordPress, ensuring the client has the knowledge and resources necessary to take control of their own site.
