Avon Construction Training Group supports small businesses in the South West and offer their member organisations staff training courses, business breakfast networking events and informative talks with guest speakers from the construction industry.
Their main function is to connect qualified training providers with the construction industry to provide certified courses in such things as fork lift driving, machine operation and health and safety standards.
They needed a site to promote their work and give them a more public profile, to show forthcoming networking events and training courses and also to keep track of their monthly newsletter mailshots.
This important industry website required a functional and businesslike design, with a strong navigational structure to show the large quantities of important information in a logical and ordered display.
The site also needed an events calendar and membership and feedback form for new members.
We decided to use the Joomla Content Management System since it is suited to organising large amounts of informative articles into sections and categories.
We redesigned the ACTG logo to make it simpler and more contemporary, and used the muted blue as the basis for the layout design.
To avoid copyright issues on images the page illustrations and header image were created from photos that we took around Bristol which luckily was in the middle of a massive reconstruction at the time.
Most construction industry websites have used the familiar yellow and black diagonal striped warning strips as a signature emblem to represent construction, but this has become so ubiquitous that it now appears to be a visual cliché.
We made a conscious decision not to rely on such a typical symbol, instead choosing more subtle references to construction such as tiny rivets in the corners of the menu boxes, and a header based on our photos of construction and building work.
