Milford Waterfront
We were delighted to once again work alongside Milford Haven Port Authority to design and develop a new website for Milford Waterfront. The objective was to create an enjoyable and informative web experience that would showcase the various different qualities that the waterfront has to offer including its large array of different businesses, events and things to do.
The website reflects the vibrancy of the waterfront destination and its culture throughout the design, using strong colours and exciting imagery to attract visitors. We offered a number of different key templates, working closely with the brand guidelines to create a visual identity for the site that would celebrate the content whilst offering the functionality and user experience necessary to make exploring the website easy and enjoyable.
Design and CMS Flexibility
The homepage was designed to be an exciting starting point leading to the different sections of the website, offering glimpses of the available content through various different reusable components such as a Slider/Banner, “Call to Action” strips, half and half Text and Image sections, a News and Instagram Feed and more.
These reusable components were designed for maximum flexibility and control. We used the award-winning Content Management System (CMS) Umbraco to give backend users great ease in managing content and design where necessary – such as being able to choose from a palette of colours on all backgrounds, text and button elements, complete control over imagery and text, and being able to implement the waterfront’s trademark “W” and “M” watermarks over certain areas.
Bespoke Templates, SEO, APIs & Mobile
Two of the most important areas of Milford Waterfront’s website have always been their Businesses and Events. Utilising the flexibility of the CMS, we created unique templates that would allow each business and event to be easily added and maintained in the backend, whilst offering the user intuitive navigational and sorting options in the front-end, with custom business and event listing pages as well as an interactive map of the waterfront.
Both businesses and events make use of third-party APIs such as Google Maps to make them easily discoverable to users, and display important data in appealing ways to the user such as having the ability to add an event to your phone calendar. As well as presenting this data to the user, the website has also been designed with structured data and customisable Search Engine Optimisation in mind to make Businesses, Events, Recipes, Places and News more easily discoverable by search engines and mobile devices.
Custom Data Types and more
The events section required advanced bespoke development work within the Umbraco system to provide the client with a highly complex but easy to use “Event Settings” data type to control the dates, times and frequencies of their events. The data type allows the user to manage daily, weekly and monthly iterations of their event, with a multitude of options for each occurrence to cover a wide range of different scenarios. As well as this, the user is able to easily add tags and link important information such as businesses to events. Using all the data provided, we were able to create a number of useful reusable components for events such as auto-generated “Related Content”.
On top of all this the website is fully responsive with focus on appearance across all devices, has contact forms that are fully integrated with the waterfront’s new CRM system, and we were able to perform content migration for the client to seamlessly switch over from their old website.
Visit Milford Waterfront
Take a look at their website in action.