Website Design & Development

AG Barr

The brief

AG Barr came to us wanting to simplify and modernise the design and structure of their exisiting website, which was starting to look, a little out-of-date. The main aim for the website was to offer stakeholders transparent, consistent, and accessible information about the business, all in one place. Think of the website as a one-stop-shop that’s suitable for investors, employees, job seekers, customers, consumers, media, and researchers to get the information they need, in a timely manner.

What we did

We designed and built a vibrant, futureproofed and easy to use website using Umbraco. And in June 2022 it won Best Certified Partner Website at the Annual Umbraco Awards.

Take a look

Jumping from 2015 to 2021

When AG Barr came to us feeling their website was out of date, the certainly weren't wrong. Having being built in 2015, now 6 years later, it was definitely time for a refresh. Once we got our heads together, on this project, we knew straight away that the new site needed to be built on the latest version of Umbraco, due to the automatic updates it offers, as well as the tight security and super easy user management.

We also didn’t want the website to be built and then left to run its course, so we made sure we encorporated comprehensive analytics, which would allows the team to amend, develop and improve the site based on the data we get back monthly.

Dudley Building Society Website on iPhone - Pixelbuilders

A one-of-a-kind website built by one-of-a-kind designers…

Our creative team we’re given two key elements that they had to deliver on: UX and site/ content structure as well as creativity and effortless brand control.

One of the key issues to address through the new website was the number of different audiences it needs to serve and the differentiation between them - consumers vs investors, the media vs employees etc. Due to this, we had to engineer the content architecture and site structure to ensure that all the different reams of content didn’t end up looking like grannies’ patchwork quilt!

Through workshops and wireframe proto typing, we worked out the correct hierarchy of the audiences, their needs (including overlaps) and worked to produce a site structure and information flow that worked well for all.

As if that wasn't complicated enough, when you’re working with some of the world’s most famous brands – never mind the main parent brand itself, it’s important that creatively, the website stands head and shoulders above the rest. It was also a challenge (which of course we overcame) for the design team to interweave 17 different brands under the parent umbrella brand equally, and without it looking like an explosion in a paint factory and we have to say, we think we did a pretty good job...

Fancy, fast, secure & simple

Our development team were tasked with four key metrics:

Ensuring that the skill in the front-end development lived up to the great UI our design team had created
Ensuring the underlying code was performance optimised to ensure the site would perform successfully both organically and across the various marketing mediums that AG Barr use
As AG Barr are a large-scale PLC, ensuring that the site was highly secure and could pass the numerous PEN tests that the site was placed under
Ensuring the website was easy to manage and that all content was controllable by the internal team at AG Barr – with their previous website the CMS was cumbersome and required a lot of duplicate work even for simple tasks