Investment Site with Modern Web Design

Castlebay Investment Partners is a equity fund manager based in Glasgow, Scotland. They were founded in 2013.  Over the years they have built a team of highly qualified advisors that all agree on the companies non-negotiable core values, these are ‘Honesty and Integrity’, ‘Doing the basics really well’ and, ‘Growth mindset’. Maintaining a strong relationship with their clients is very important to Castlebay so naturally this will carry over into their website.

What Was Required

We have worked with Castlebay for many years and did design their previous website, they must have been happy with our work as they got in touch with us to request a new and updated site. They asked up for a fresh, modern look while keeping the usability of the old version, this new site should be faster, more secure, maintain accessibility and, be fully responsive. The content of the website was to be kept and transferred to the new site. The site used Concrete CMS version 5.6 which would need to be updated to version 9.

Our Approach

The first stage of this process is creating the new design, our goal was to create a clean, fresh, trustable site that projected Castlebay’s experience in their field. Through the use of expanders we were able to guide the user to relevant pieces of content on each page, this helps keep information overload down to a minimum. We added block level animations to highlight certain elements and this adds a touch of flare to the site as well.  The site has a lot of informational imagery such as graphs and scans of letters so we needed to make sure these were properly displayed for the users.

Migrating site content is never an easy task, so we needed to rely on our experience to overcome the usual pitfalls during this step. We started off by creating an XML export of the current site, this, along with a archive of all the media, is added to the instance of the new site. The content types (blocks, page types ... etc.) of the two site versions need to match initially, this helps the passing of content from the export to the final pages of the rebuild.

Things to Overcome

Preforming a redesign and rebuild of a current site has a lot of advantages like, being able to keep up with the ever evolving design trends and easily implementing modern technology in the development side, however, it does come with down sides. With a completely new website design you have a blank canvas giving you the ability to start from scratch, controlling everything, from colour scheme to content positioning. For a redesign, the logo is normally in place which in this case contained brand colours, the content of the old site was also moving to new one so we had to work around this and make sure it fit into the updated design.

From a web development point of view the big issue was the incompatibility of the Concrete CMS versions, there is no upgrade path from v5.6 to v9, so moving the content from the old site will require using the migration tool

Conclusion

The new website for Castlebay Investment Partners is a successful example of a redesign and rebuild project. The site is faster, more secure, accessible, and responsive than the previous version, and it features a fresh, modern design that projects Castlebay's experience in their field. The new website is now live and receiving positive feedback from Castlebay's clients. The site is easy to navigate and provides users with the information they need in a clear and concise way. Overall, the project was a success and the new website is a valuable asset to Castlebay Investment Partners. Overall, the project was completed on time and within budget, and the client is happy with the results.