Responses by Charles Blouin, creative director and cofounder, Beauvoir.

Background: Our main goal in redesigning our site was to strengthen our position as an integrated creative agency with in-house branding, video and web-production capabilities. It was also the perfect timing to show our true colors and boundless creativity. With a new business development campaign launching last fall, we had just three months to develop the entire website.

Design core: This site was designed out from the big picture right down to every detail. Involving different people from our multidisciplinary team in every step of the process really allowed us to do things differently. One of the main features that came out of the first brainstorm was having an interactive video on the homepage that presented both the agency and its services, while also offering an “alternative” way to seamlessly navigate through the site’s sections.

Challenges: Obviously, having only three months to create the website from scratch was really motivating, especially considering the fact that we also had to shoot everything for the video and build many new portfolio pages. Sure, it was as ambitious as it was stressful, but I think it’s also what made it such a successful project. Everybody wanted it to happen and knew we had no second chance, so we all dove in at full speed and had a lot of fun in the process.

Navigation structure: The main idea was to make sure the user would never reach a dead end. We planned the navigation experience as a potential never-ending scroll, but we also included classic navigation features such as the default menu. If I’m being honest, though, I think it’s a lot more fun to just go with the flow and let yourself be immersed in the content as you navigate the site!

Technology: This project was built with Wordpress using a custom theme based on the Sage framework. On the front-end side, we relied on good ol’ HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery stack. However, with projects like this one, success doesn’t rely on the technological stack itself. What you really need is an extensive understanding of the technology paired with good creative sense and a limitless desire to refine. That’ll make a much bigger impact.