Overview: Aligning the company story
In its first year, Melbourne-based construction company Kapitol Group started with 4 staff and made $34 million. Fast forward several years and today it has scaled to 150 staff, with a $300m turnover in the last financial year and further growth projected.
With such rapid transformation, it was expected that Kapitol Group would outgrow its website. Determined to revisit the company’s online presence, co-directors Andrew Deveson and David Caputo said “Our level of sophistication is above the size of the projects we do. The website doesn’t tell this story.”
Process: Starting from ground zero
The structure of Kapitol’s website needed a reboot to better resonate with industry partners, clients, and talented employees (both current and future).
After Avion conducted research, including a strategic review featuring multiple workshops and stakeholder interviews, we identified the following problems:
- Outdated content and design
- Poor user experience
- Text heavy
- Unclear navigation
- Lack of visual impact
- Ineffective integration with other digital tools
- Inaccurate reflection of staff diversity
- A need to showcase current and past projects and awards
Planning important content in collaboration with digital agency Luminary, we developed several sitemaps for review.
An early but valuable iteration of the new website’s architecture.
Results: A practical journey to project success
To move forward with production and get the outcomes that Kapitol was looking for, there were 3 main challenges to overcome.
Balancing vision with cost
Could we really achieve the look, feel, function, and level of information the client wanted? Absolutely. But how much would that cost? The entire project had to account for strategy, design, and development as well as content – so Avion and Luminary worked together to scope what features and sections to prioritise, while also cleverly thinking about how we could minimise effort for others. For example, we repurposed wireframes and components across pages in a way that wasn’t obvious to the average user.
Working agile to meet deadline
Website projects involve a lot of moving parts. A typical waterfall approach requires one stage to be completed before the next can begin – meaning go-live can take a long time. At Avion, our preference is to work agile. So, for this project we had designers, developers, and content strategists working in parallel across 12 sprints. The process involved daily Zoom standups, a Miro board, and Jira Cards to track progress.
Streamlining content with integrations
Kapitol used several other digital applications for different areas of the business, such as LiveHire for recruitment and EstimateOne for tenders. Avion’s content strategists and writers had to identify what these programs were, how they worked, and what they would look like once integrated with the site. To make this happen, we consulted with Kapitol and the web development team to ensure the relevant plug-ins would appear clean upon launch, and that the flow of content made sense (there was no duplication or complication of design).
