Background
PND Engineers is a leader in the civil engineering space—and has been since 1979 when it was founded in Alaska. With unique engineering specialties (including Arctic, waterfront, and coastal engineering), PND provides end-to-end services for their clients.
The old PND website wasn’t telling the full story of their innovation or experience. So PND approached Solid Digital to help bring the website into the 21st century—with better site architecture, informed messaging, and attractive visuals. Additionally, the PND marketing team wanted the full capability to easily update their site. In particular, PND wanted to:
- Update the website’s look and feel
- Improve user experience to increase engagement
- Be able to streamline updates to the site
- Highlight their experience
- Effectively use analytics to make data-drive decisions
- Showcase culture, benefits, and why engineers should consider PND for employment
With the new website, PND wanted to show off their end-to-end process, their exceptional client experience, and their expertise in Alaska and Arctic regions (while also promoting their work in the lower 48 states). Additionally, and most important of all, PND wanted to place their incredible innovations on display, including OPEN CELL™ among other proprietary designs they’ve pioneered.
Approach
The approach for PND’s new website included a learn and discovery phase at the outset. Solid Digital learned more about PND’s business, about their customers and stakeholder through interviews, and performed competitor research – all of which helped inform the direction of the branding, messaging, and visual design.
To achieve PND’s goals, Solid Digital developed a plan paired with specific services:
- Copywriting – improve UX through messaging to increase engagement, showcase culture and benefits, and Why PND for prospective employees
- Design – update look and feel, improve UX; highlight PND Engineer’s experience using specific projects and use cases paired with excellent photography and architectural/engineering imagery
- Development – Migrate to a reliable CMS to streamline updates; and create a back-end for replicable success
Process
Throughout the process, both teams worked together to show PND’s innovative and expensive engineering solutions for clients. PND’s team was extremely receptive and leaned on Solid Digital to create the ideal visual design and site architecture while ensuring that everything written and shown on the website, down to the punctuation, represented PND with 100% accuracy.
Look, Feel, and UX
Solid Digital helped PND’s brand evolve, crafting a brand personality to pair with their existing colors and logo. In order to showcase impressive projects, PND gathered results, use cases, client testimonials, and a wide assortment of stunning photography to use throughout the website.
For copywriting, Solid’s team put together content pillars, crafted messaging for nearly all of the pages on the site, and took copious notes from PND’s team, carefully writing accurate and comprehensive copy to connect with the audience, showing partnership, expertise, and mutual success. The copywriter worked with PND’s technical writer to ensure accuracy of proprietary and technical terminology. Additionally, at each turn, client testimonials and employee quotes put PND’s success on full display.
Beyond imagery and social proof, the user experience was set to be improved, as well. The copywriter on Solid Digital’s team as well as the marketing team from PND helped create a general outline of the process PND follows for projects: Plan—Design—Build—Solve, showing off the end-to-end services the engineering firm provides. In much the same way, the hero section on the homepage was crafted to show the start-to-finish process, using project renderings at the top of the page. The subtle grid background is a nod to the engineering world, and the different CTA style treatments catch the eye of visitors ready to move forward with a project.
Also to improve UX, image carousels were introduced to display multiple project images, and a clear hierarchy of information was established, both in the new mega menu and on each page. Through the mega menu, PND is able to draw more attention to their specific specialties—from Arctic, waterfront, and coastal engineering to their proprietary innovations like OPEN CELL allowing users to take the customer journey that meets their needs.
Through fun details on the Careers and Company pages, with Polaroid-style photos and scroll-responsive movement on the timeline, PND’s culture of adventure was able to come to life, to attract prospective employees.
Development
The development for the site involved content migration from an old CMS to WordPress. Additionally, to show the correct personnel on each office’s landing page, the required data had to be fully set up and organized so PND can easily add a team member and earmark which office they belong to. Once the personnel are added and tagged, the site handles showing the correct personnel on each office’s page, and listing the correct info for each person on the main personnel page.
Because PND is dispersed in offices across Alaska and North America, the taxonomy had to work for multiple geographic locations, allowing team members, projects, and offices to appear in the appropriate places and on the correct pages. Solid Digital worked to ensure PND’s team was trained and confident in making these adjustments after the project was complete.
Additionally, as is typical with Solid Digital’s website redesigns, our team was able to improve the overall page performance and speed of PND’s new website.
Challenges
PND has a large team with lots of stakeholders and an abundance of ideas—Solid sorted through the ideas with them, and efficiently completed the website redesign within the estimated timeline. But the process wasn’t without a few bumps in the road.
Having a large team in multiple locations made meetings (with times and dates that worked for everyone) essential. This dispersal of PND’s team and project areas also meant the website had to display projects in a variety of places on the site dynamically. Even for location pages, different tiers of staff needed to be identified and placed properly.
Additionally, contact forms were created to be specific for each office location, from Anchorage to Dallas. PND’s connection to each individual community (and their outstanding client experience and referral rates) required current and prospective customers to easily contact a specific office, rather than one main line.
Results
After launching in late August, PND Engineers has provided fantastic feedback for our team at Solid Digital. We successfully helped them achieve an updated, user-friendly website beautifully highlighting their experience, culture, and benefits through clear, precise copy—all with an easy-to-update backend that will allow them to use analytics to make data-driven decisions for their future.
To date, PND is continuing our partnership, and we’re working together to host their site, provide ongoing support and help keep their site running as efficiently as ever.
