Kimley-Horn
Kimley-Horn is one of the nation’s premier planning and design consulting firms, Kimley-Horn has 2,800 staff members in more than 75 offices across the U.S. and offers full services in a wide range of disciplines related to transportation, aviation, the environment, land development, transit, urban planning, landscape architecture, and water resources.
Design Concepts
Quick Facts
Kimley-HornKimley-Horn is one of the nation’s premier planning and design consulting firms, Kimley-Horn has 2,800 staff members in more than 75 offices across the U.S. and offers full services in a wide range of disciplines related to transportation, aviation, the environment, land development, transit, urban planning, landscape architecture, and water resources.
Challenge
When we started the web design conversation with Kimley-Horn, their website was in dire need of a redesign. The Kimley-Horn team was the first to admit that it wasn’t a scalable solution that could grow with them. It was difficult to make simple updates and lacked the capabilities to add more pages based on how their business was growing.
They knew the importance of staying up to date with user expectations, but their website wasn’t mobile friendly and didn’t appeal to how users want to consume content: visually.
All in all, we needed to create a visually appealing website for Kimley-Horn that highlighted their single most competitive advantage and brand position: Expect More. Experience Better.
Strategy
We wanted to understand Kimley-Horn on the deepest level possible. To start, we spoke with Executives across practices within the company to learn from various vantage points:
- Who is Kimley-Horn?
- What does Kimley-Horn do?
- Why Kimley-Horn?
These interviews are invaluable because they better position us to accurately present Kimley-Horn to their target audience. During these discussions, we learned that Kimley-Horn is the firm you want to hire for a high-profile, important project that you can’t afford to have go wrong, the experience of working with Kimley-Horn is just better, and Kimley-Horn takes a greater level of ownership for their clients’ projects than more other firms and identify as an employee of their client’s company.
Next, we defined target audiences to include:
- Potential client in the public sector
- Potential clients in the private sector
- Recruits
For recruiting purposes, the new site needed to attract top talent and showcase Kimley-Horn as a great place to work. For business prospecting purposes, the new site needed to showcase the full scope of capabilities with examples of specific work they’ve done related to the visitor.
Then, we dove into laying the foundation with a site architecture that’s logical and simple to navigate. The new navigation shows improved organization of the markets Kimley-Horn works in and the services they provide to clients within those markets.
The design of the new website illustrates their intensity, drive and distinct energy in a clean, simplified way. Attention to detail with scroll over effects and creative treatments for CTAs incorporate Kimley-Horn’s brand guidelines in a subtle, yet impactful, way.
Finally, the saying goes “you can design and develop a beautiful, new website but if nobody can find it did you really design and develop a beautiful, new website?” Prior to this redesign, Kimley-Horn was doing minimal SEO work. We changed that and set off to increase their visibility in search engines.
Our keyword strategy targeted terms related to services like Aviation Engineering and Planning and career opportunities like Landscape Architect. The strategy was developed based on search volume and competition level after extensive research and analysis of the competitive landscape.
Notable Features
- Custom project portfolio
- Social media feed integration
