WOODELO

RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN, UX

WOODEN BICYCLES?

A RESPONSIVE WEBSITE FOR A FRAME MANUFACTURER

Woodelo are an Irish company who design and build beautiful bicycles from an unusual material - Ash wood. They needed a strategy to explain their process, give confidence in the material choice, and showcase their beautiful frames. Our challenge was to bring their online presence up to date by building a fully responsive website.

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OUR APPROACH

FORM AFTER FUNCTION

Woodelo frames are sculptures as much as they are functional machines, and as the bikes were shot so beautifully, we made sure the design didn’t get in the way of the photography. Following the Identity Guidelines by our friends at gwizz.ie we used a single webfont and a strict colour palette across the site. Flat design muted the background and concise text content allowed the images to speak for themselves.

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PAGE DESIGN

The homepage skips the wordage and gets straight to the point by showcasing an intro video, and thumbnails of all of the frame styles made by Woodelo. The menu structure is similarly minimal, and gets the user to the information they want as quickly as possible.

THE NUTS & BOLTS

The framework was custom built with Ruby on Rails to give us lean code structure and to minimise security risk. The images were all optimised to reduce file size, and we used a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up load times by distributing the content around the world so it’s closer to our visitor’s location. A quick page load combines with good design to create a pleasant and memorable user experience for website visitors, we believe we achieved this for woodelo.com

JUST THE FACTS

We designed tiles around little snippets of  information, as a quick way to inform the customer about some of the unique properties of the bikes as they browse the site. They display randomly so that a different tile set appears on each view. Who knew that ash wood is stronger than carbon fibre and more comfortable than aluminium?

GEOMETRY REDESIGNED

Woodelo frames are sculptures as much as they are functional machines, and as the bikes were shot so beautifully, we made sure the design didn’t get in the way of the photography. Following the Identity Guidelines by our friends at gwizz.ie we used a single webfont and a strict colour palette across the site. Flat design muted the background and concise text content allowed the images to speak for themselves.

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SUMMARY

What we learned from this project: There is a balancing act between high quality photography and quick download times. We carried out user testing to find the tipping point where users were still excited to see the loaded image, and not frustrated by the wait.

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