McLaughlin & Harvey

A new online home for the construction giant

In 2023, McLaughlin & Harvey celebrated 170 years in business and looked to further cement their market leadership through a new brand purpose and values. Alongside this, they required a new website that better communicated their expertise and showcased their wealth of experience.

Research

Initially, it was clear that the McLaughlin & Harvey team faced some challenges with their existing site, as it didn’t allow for flexible content. Their case studies demanded dynamic features like live video feeds, interactive maps, persuasive statistics, and testimonials.

Lucy’s comprehensive UX audit uncovered a deeper issue. The website’s sprawling sitemap and disorganised page layouts were causing significant navigational hurdles. For instance, the presence of 345 projects caused prolonged page load times; older news posts lacked effective filtering options to be seen, and the frameworks page required excessive scrolling. The challenge was to condense a large, content-heavy website into a more streamlined, user-friendly browsing experience.

Design

After a site map workshop with the McL&H team, the website design was underway. Simultaneous with our work on the website, McL&H made the strategic decision to improve their brand strategy and visual identity. We worked in close collaboration with The Foundation to align our design choices, and this synergy resulted in an elevated website design – allowing for an expanded colour palette, new fonts, and fresh design elements to enhance visual appeal.

Development

Lead Developer Matthew spearheaded development of this mammoth website, one of the largest in his eight year career. Using GSAP, coupled with ScrollTrigger and Lenis, allowed us to showcase the frameworks and projects through buttery smooth, eye-catching horizontal scrolling sections. Elsewhere, various API integrations ensured a seamless experience across the newly designed projects and careers sections. The projects section in particular went beyond traditional expectations, in that it needed both filterable grid and map views to display over 100 case studies. Overall, this website had a bit of everything – a big challenge, but an equally big success!

Special thanks

For our biggest web project to date, thanks to Robert, Lori, Hazel, Thomas, Stuart and the rest of the McLaughlin & Harvey team for your support and trust during the process.

Thank you to Erin and Steve at The Foundation for leading the brand strategy and visual identity project, giving us an exciting framework to build within.