Design and Development of Millmerran Website

Millmerran website design by eightyone design - Paignton Devon

Millmerran are a group of polymer engineering specialists, highly experienced in the extrusion industry, particularly in the fields of product and process development. The company is based in Newton Abbot, South Devon and at the beginning of the year we were invited to design a website for Millmerran.

The client required a professional looking website to showcase their expertise and products. After meeting with the client we researched their target markets and industry. The client requested that some elements of silver were used in the website to reflect the gradient of the logo. They also requested that the header image was somewhat longer as their machinery is taller rather than wider.

We started by creating wireframes for key pages of the website.

Millmerran website design wireframe by eightyone design - Paignton South Devon

The client was happy with the proposed layout of the website so we moved onto the design. We wanted to keep the silver elements very light so not to draw attention away from the logo – we felt that mass amounts of silver look more like gradients of grey (which really they are) rather than silver. We used a faint graph paper texture behind blocks of colour to give the site some depth and subtly indicate it’s industry.

Millmerran website design wireframe by eightyone design - Paignton South Devon

Millmerran website design by eightyone design - Paignton South Devon

We were happy with the homepage, however there was a lot of blank space to the left of the products on the subsequent pages and felt that this was a bad use of space. We therefore re-visited the layout and moved the navigation further down so it was parallel to the content.

Millmerran website design by eightyone design - Paignton South Devon

The client preferred the latter visual, so we started the website build.

The client requested a content managed website, and I’m sure you all know by now that WordPress is our first choice for a CMS website. We always start with Starkers – the totally nude WordPress theme. This theme allows us to build the site from scratch.

The Millmerran website utilises a couple of neat little plugins. One of which is “Fast Secure Contact Form“, which is a super easy to use contact form which blocks spammers. The site also uses multiple slideshows in the header, this is managed via the “Meteor Slides” plugin.

Once the website was built the client felt that the header was just too deep and it wasn’t allowing enough information to sit ‘above the fold’. So we reduced the header size and used cropped images of machinery rather than full images.

Millmerran website design by eightyone design - Paignton South Devon

We believe the Millmerran website is clean, professional and easy to use. But what do you think of the design of the Millmerran website – www.millmerran.co.uk? Are you using WordPress as a CMS? Are there any further plugins you’d recommend?