Warren and Mahoney’s website was aging. Their brand and site didn’t reflect their offering or align with their Business Development strategy. They sought a new brand and website to help them to expand on existing partnerships, highlight key projects, tell staff stories and build the internal culture across the multiple offices. While you can create a website relatively simply, we sought to create a system to fuel the online and offline presences. Previously the site was a provided little measurement and context to the diverse range of disciplines and work that Warren and Mahoney complete

Architect’s sites often exist as a static monograph. Commonly built in Flash, sites can treat the user as voyeur rather than explaining context or the design process. A practice can treat their website like a building, finished once published, and never revisited until the site is redesigned due to a changing need within the business. While this is perfectly appropriate for some, we sought to build a more organic structure to move the firm from just a long list of projects. Moving the conversation into the people, place and perspectives that Architects bring to the creative process. All of the givens are there, you want the site to be easily searchable and shareable but also give context to each projects process and featuring the team behind the building.

The website was the initial part of a rebrand project, repositioning Warren and Mahoney in the local Australasian market rather than just the New Zealand market. As part of this process, it was identified that Warren and Mahoney needed to have both a point of view and document the work and process created over the three generations of the practice. We worked to frame their working process through the 4Ds – Discover, Define, Design and Deliver. This allowed Warren and Mahoney to simply communicate their working process, establishing their positions as thought leaders through a simple online publishing platform. As part of the project we established new internal processes to help share knowledge and inspiration across the four offices through an internal system.

During the brand development process, we undertook research including interviews with key influencers and stakeholders covering construction partners, building commissioners, local body government project managers and the existing staff. As part of these interviews we developed a set of principals for how the brand operates online and the key communication objectives. The strongest input came from stakeholders including written materials by directors of the company.

The site has allowed Warren and Mahoney to respond to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, allowing them to start communicating their vision for the Christchurch city centre to be rebuilt. Website articles and featured projects were aligned with the PR campaign earning coverage in all major New Zealand papers and television.
Page views to the website have now increased by 550% and the site bounce rate dropped significantly. With the structure of the new website and associating key staff with hero projects, Warren and Mahoney has spoke at multiple industry events covering workplace strategy (a new discipline offering) and profiled key reputation projects. Internal engagement has allowed publishing of project sheets and competitions boards to reduce both time and effort to have a more responsive publishing system.
Warren and Mahoney projects have started to be featured on external websites through ‘stolen’ content – easily appropriated pictures and text have been copied and attributed increasing mentions within the wider New Zealand and Australian and architectural communities and building both Warren and Mahoney and their staff reputations.