First, we took time to establish Claremont’s wants and needs by listening to their concerns and frustrations with their previous agency partnerships. Our first steps involved fixing technical issues on their site and developing a content calendar based on search volume data.   During site migration to our hosting platform, we faced unexpected challenges due to the outdated website. While we successfully resolved these issues and strengthened our relationship with Claremont, it highlighted the need for a new website.   For a while, we continued with technical SEO, backlink management, content analysis, and form redesigns to support their lead generation tools. Our transparent approach included dashboards, monthly meetings, and detailed task lists. However, despite achieving improved rankings and traffic, Claremont increasingly understood that their website just wasn’t up to scratch… and they now felt sure that we were the right team to build one for them!

Their people-centric approach ensures that their designs not only meet functional requirements, but also enhance employee well-being and productivity. As the first employee-owned company in their sector, they are a genuine industry leader, so our task was to make sure that all of these qualities came across in their website.   Claremont didn’t necessarily want to completely overhaul their old site; they just wanted to refine the design, revitalise the content, and improve on functionality. These improvements would really reflect their status as an industry leader, and make it easier for them to track and optimise for conversions in the long term. They also stressed that the new website would need to launch within quite a tight timeframe. After some consideration, it was decided that we would build the website using SUDS, our modern and proprietary spin on WordPress.

To assist our efforts to work according to the timescale that Claremont required, we decided that the new website would maintain a similar structure to the old one, but with refinements to ensure functionality and properly represent their high standards. For example, we upscaled a lot of their old components by converting them to a better standard and templating language.   We made many notable improvements to various aspects of the site that were clearly lacking. Areas such as embedded videos, which proved particularly troublesome for page speed on the old site, needed to be addressed. We also took the opportunity to further enhance their forms to improve user experience and remove any remaining barriers to completion.   We created many first-time animations and sliders for this site, and some required additional research and the use of personal development time to practice making them. A great example of a tricky component to get right is the slide-up feature seen on the new What We Do page. However, perhaps our biggest achievement lay in our implementation of the real-time search and filtering of their case studies on the Our Work page. Another innovation that needed a lot of expertise was the stats component on The Destination Office page. These stats were rebuilt to function dynamically, and we were also able to repurpose them for the case studies page.   Speaking of dynamic, this website uses an enormous amount of video content. Our latest SUDS framework really cuts things down to the essentials without compromising on capability, and the fact that we were able to achieve a high page speed despite all of these videos is a testament to that fact. The videos lazy load until they’re interacted with, minimising their negative impact on site performance and scoring. We also created functionality to control play/pause and mute/unmute settings on videos by using custom buttons, as well as play/pause videos on mouse enter/leave.   As the countdown to the Christmas deadline ticked away, our brilliant development team still found the time to keep the Claremont team updated every step of the way through our regular touchpoints. It was a close-run thing, but we managed to launch right before the deadline!