client
MacFadden and sons
role
Web design
Web Development
Interaction design
year
2020
Farm Equipment Web Design
Macfadden & Sons Inc. is an agriculture equipment dealer out of New York who sells Mahindra and other popular farm brands. They sell used equipment, new equipment, parts, offer service, consign equipment, and hold auctions.
I was assigned the project of updating their website using existing branding, with an emphasis on equipment first. They wanted their equipment at the forefront of their site, and wanted me to come up with solutions to make finding equipment easy for their customers. They offered a number of services and products, so organizing their website in a way that would be usable was key.
Challenge
The challenge was creating options for finding equipment, and improving the usability of their site without a lot of reference. They also had a set brand, so staying consistent with what existed and creating digital assets and elements that fit with their existing branding would pose challenging. There were so many links in this site that needed to be produced to pull specified equipment. I also developed this site within the parameters of a WordPress CMS, which can be limiting in some ways.
Design Solution
With the goal of equipment being at the forefront of their website–I designed and developed ways that could be interacted with and easily editable for the customer. I designed numerous ways for equipment to be found and accessed on their site. I created a large navigation with category breakdowns, a mega footer with equipment links, a search feature on the site, and interactive elements on the homepage to seek equipment. With the knowledge I had of the WordPress CMS I was able to utilize as many built-in features to successfully code all the interactive elements.
Interactive Elements
I built a number of interactive elements into the site for usable and easier access to finding equipment. I wanted to show many ways of finding equipment while still keeping the customer intrigued as they moved down the home page. I found ways to utilize the built-in features as much as possible to reduce the amount of code being pulled for page speed.
Overview
I really enjoyed developing this website. I found adding all the interactive elements and finding new solutions to present information was really enjoyable to design and build. I felt like with this site I was working with the software, not against it. I enjoyed using various plugins and feeling like the entire project felt cohesive. This was a huge improvement from their last site as far as usability and performance go.
Christa Kranig 