Responses by Forge Creative.

Background: The main purpose of this site is to inspire homeowners and architects to use concrete as a feature for their next project and not hide it away under carpet or plaster. Using concrete has many advantages, including its durability, energy efficiency, ease of maintenance and modern aesthetics—which is where Peter Fell comes in with its colored concrete system.

On top of that, the Peter Fell site is also a library of information for anything about concrete to help everyone, from specifiers to professional concrete layers to casual DIYers.

Core design/features: The clear use of a grid system and lots of negative space are both a nod to architectural design publications and typography. These allow for an attractive display of the heavy information throughout the Peter Fell website. This grid can also be seen in the way we utilize the whole screen on the homepage for the user to navigate through seven types of inspirations for their next projects.

One of the main features of the website is the Design Tool that we developed to guide users to choose the proper color, texture, patterns and protection for their concrete surface. At the last step of the Design Tool, the user can choose to get a report and up to three color samples delivered to them.

Challenge: From the briefing stage, the challenge was already clear to us: How can we display all seven inspirations with equal weight but still make them look inspirational?

The traditional way of doing this would be to display each inspiration one at a time on screen in a slider to show impact, or show all of them as small thumbnails at the same time, which would reduce the impact of the images. Instead, we chose to let the user choose what they would like to see. Without blatantly instructing the user on what to do, we made most of the screen area buttons that change the whole background as the user moves the position of their cursor. By playing with this, the user will discover how to navigate through the seven spaces of inspirations.

The Design Tool was developed to fix the problem of the vast amount of information scattered throughout the old site. By forcing users to focus on simple choices, the Design Tool leads them through only relevant options based on their previous selections. This lets them provide basic specifications for contractors to create the space they want.

Technology: The site is built using WordPress with a custom theme. The Design Tool and color picker are built as popups using JavaScript. The product section utilizes Woo Commerce.