Urban Engineers was at a significant moment, transitioning leadership and looking for a website that would celebrate and capture the legacy and history of the organization while looking to the future. Given it was only the company’s third change in leadership since its founding in 1960, it was ever-crucial to do this right.
These touch points allowed our team to get in-depth insights from their internal staff, as well as current and former clients. We explored project goals, needs and audiences for the website as well as the Urban Engineers brand and the experience of working with them.
Analytics revealed insights into how users are currently using the site. This insight informed and validated our work, and empowered their team to prioritize and streamline content going forward.
We explored the core values of the individuals that make up the organization, which helped capture the spirit and mission of Urban Engineers. We were able to use those insights, along with key goals for the website, to frame decision-making in collaborative, participatory exercises that focused on their brand, content and visuals.
We partnered with a content strategist from the beginning to ensure this complex organization — one with a wealth of services, projects and content — could effectively communicate who they are, what they do and who they serve. This work resulted in key messaging, site maps, content workshops and a content governance guide.
Members of their internal team felt they needed an updated the logo, but the organization was not ready for a full redesign of their visual identity. They felt having an outside voice who could recommend slight tweaks to the current mark might help move that process along. Our team maintained the structure of the mark but updated the typeface to compliment the typography in the newly designed site.
“We're people working for people.” Showing the human side of Urban Engineers and engineering was a key priority. Because engineering often happens in the background of our lives, we never quite notice its impact until something goes wrong — so it was important to highlight that the places we live, work and play are designed by people, for the people.
Our research revealed that when it comes to hiring decisions, Urban Engineers believes that the services they offer are secondary to the specific people working on the project. In addition to celebrating their team and humanizing the organization, this became a key strategy in highlighting their talent and expertise to help win projects. We created multiple ways to highlight the faces of the organization (leadership, team members, and the board), connect people to projects, and and provide easy paths to get in touch with the Urban Engineers team.
From the beginning, we knew that we needed to pay special attention to how Urban Engineers organizes and categorizes its markets and services. With a dedicated content strategist working closely with their marketing team, we offered them a content structure and key messaging that not only effectively communicates what they do and who they serve in a concise, clear way on their website – but that can also be used in any of their communication touchpoints and marketing materials going forward.
With a truly impressive portfolio and expansive breadth of markets served, it was critical to bring projects to the forefront of the website and allow users to easily find if Urban Engineers could address their needs through browsing services they are looking for or the market in which they belong.
Their team had a wealth of great content that was just out of reach and an extremely creative, talented staff whose work was buried or limited to an internal audience. Through our content strategy process, we were able to pull that content up to the surface and integrate — even showcase it — more seamlessly into the new website.
It was important for Urban Engineers to stand out in a national market while maintaining and displaying their pride and roots in Philadelphia. For a company largely with deep roots the Philadelphia region, the ability to highlight their national reach and the breadth of their work will position them for growth beyond the region.
This extremely active, passionate team was already creating great content and think pieces that reflect their leadership and expertise in the engineering field. We elevated this content by providing their team with a blog engine that features more robust design templates and the ability to tag content.