Harrison Drury are a premier solicitor with offices in Preston, Clitheroe, Garstang, Kendal, Lancaster, Lytham and Manchester. Their mission is to cut through jargon and be approachable, human, and friendly. They’re proud of their domestic and business service offering and needed a website that showcased their expertise in a better way.

The Brief

WHAT THEY NEEDED

Harrison Drury’s old website was hard to navigate, which meant that only a few of their service pages were easily accessible. This problem also meant that they were missing out on a lot of invaluable internal cross-selling opportunities.

In addition to the navigation problems, the old Harrison Drury website was lacking in terms of imagery. There was a real absence of people-focused imagery, which was something they wanted to change. Their brand also needed a refresh, moving away from the corporate feel of their old dark blue and purple aesthetic to more closely align with their personable mission statement. Behind the scenes, the Harrison Drury team were finding it tricky to get the most out of their CMS too. What they needed was a new WordPress website that was really simple to use, and we were happy to oblige! We met with the Harrison Drury team to discuss a partnership that not only resulted in the design and build of a website, but also project management, SEO, and a design retainer to support them with anything and everything creative, most recently social media assets and brand collateral. We’ve gone on to develop a master social media library for them in full, allowing their marketing team to easily design social posts for their LinkedIn, Facebook, and X activity.

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Initial Investigations

We began by holding a UX workshop at Harrison Drury’s office in Preston. Our Operations Director and Senior Designer met with Harrison Drury’s team to ensure that we had a great steer on a possible sitemap for them. Once we’d got all the necessary ideation for the site architecture in place, we then passed that knowledge over to our SEO team so that they could validate it using detailed keyword research.

From there, we carried out accessibility tests of their brand colour palette to make sure that it met all necessary standards. Then, it was on to the design stage, following their existing brand guidelines. However, this caused complications; Harrison Drury weren’t the biggest fan of the initial concept due to them not being the biggest fan of their brand! This was a tricky assignment, as we had no brand to anchor from in our designs. However, we rose to the challenge. We needed to establish what design elements really resonated with Harrison Drury, so we put together a comprehensive moodboard of inspiration to get the ball rolling. Within this moodboard we considered other competitors in the industry as well as layouts and styles that stand the test of time. We developed their minimal brand palette by taking tints of their primary colours, which gave us lots of options to play with. We also merged these new colours into the all-new HD gradients you see across the new site today. The shapes were developed at this stage too, taking inspiration from the “D” within the Harrison Drury logo and built up from there. The reception to this moodboard was fantastic. As a result, we went on to redevelop their brand guidelines in full after the web project, and the moodboard became a key step within our process for all future web designs that lack strict brand guidelines.

The Solution

WHAT WE DID

The resulting new build for Harrison Drury used Suds, our proprietary WordPress theme, as we firmly believe that this is one of the premier choices for user-friendliness, customisation, security, scalability, mobile friendliness, SEO friendliness, and cost-effectiveness.

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Mega-menuOne of the most important changes to make was the implementation of a mega-menu that made it supremely easy to find any of Harrison Drury’s many services. They have around 100 of these, so it was imperative to find a way to link to them naturally! Wording was key during the design, sitemap, and development stages - Harrison Drury wanted to use approachable and relatable language like “our”, “we”, and “you”. We worked hard to incorporate this, such as within the animated header banner that flips through examples of how they can support you, whoever you are. We were focused on the cross-promotion that was missing from their original site as well, ensuring that service pages promoted sub-services, the relevant teams, related news, and case studies.
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ShapesA lot of the shapes on the new Harrison Drury website were particularly tricky to build, especially the ones that were outside the content containers. To make these look right, we had to get really clever with our CSS coding, but ultimately everyone was fully satisfied with the outcome.
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Blogs and NewsThe Blogs and News migration also posed some further challenges. The old site had a vast number of posts, and only a selection were coming across to the new site. We had to bring the authors of the relevant posts onto the new site and combat some missing image issues, which meant that we had to adapt our usual processes. This included installing a Guest Authors plugin to meet their requirements and successfully migrate the posts they wanted. We made sure that as many post types as possible had their own taxonomy too, maximising the chances of cross-selling that were missing from their original site.
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Payment PortalSometimes, we have to adapt once a project is underway, and this was especially true of the payment portal work, as requirements changed during the build. Initially, we rebuilt a portal and payments offering to match their old site, but it was decided that it was best to pivot pre-launch. These were updated to utilise their in-house invoicing/payment system instead. We implemented a Review Solicitors widget as well. In terms of SEO, we supported Harrison Drury not only with redirect mapping, but also with content entry, ensuring that everything was ready for launch. Added to that, we went the extra mile by carrying out a top-level audit of their service pages, sprinkling in a little extra optimisation to set them up for success.

Our Work Amplified

We're delighted to see that the reach of our branding and website work has extended far and wide.

The new web development is now a central and consistent component of the brand’s identity. You can see examples of this execution and the ripple effect; how the website’s style and structure superbly synchronises with social media touch points.

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The Results

Harrison Drury’s new website was a complete refresh that showcased them as an approachable, stand-out brand that put people first. However, their new site yielded plenty of tangible progress too, and led to an ongoing partnership. Some of the results that Harrison Drury were delighted to see include:

255%

increase in direct website visits

27%

increase in overall sessions since launch

10%

increase in event count since launch

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