Modern WordPress Theme for a Leading Tech Company

Dream Production Services

In order to showcase their expertise, relay their corporate values and position their brand Zühlke wanted to reimplement their blog and chose us as their technology partner. The requirements provided were both cutting edge and extremely precise which made our WordPress team’s work in handling everything from concept design and wireframes, to backend and frontend development as straightforward as possible. In addition, we are very excited to provide ongoing support and maintenance for them.

Zühlke wanted a modern and robust solution that empowers their users while immersing them in an unique digital experience. One of the most important requests was to allow users to easily navigate through the vast amount of content the company published since 2013 when the blog was started. Given the project brief and the fact that the initial blog was also built on WordPress it was our responsibility to take the publishing and reading experience to the next level.

To begin with, the custom WordPress theme reimplementation needed a powerful design concept and our creative department came up with a modern yet clean proposal aligned with Zühlke’s corporate design. We built on the same brand elements used in their main website and used the existing color palette, custom fonts and information architecture to articulate a novel user experience. Each article when selected takes center stage while other visual elements around it provide an inviting yet functional layout free of distractions.

In order to keep the design fluid across all pages we had to come up with an intuitive navigation concept. For this we implemented an infinite scroll for the blog archive pages which is also inherited in the single post pages, allowing readers to navigate seamlessly through multiple pages. URLs are automatically updated on scroll without users needing to reload or navigate to other pages. For example, once you finish reading an article the next article in the queue will load automatically. If you go back to the main page, you will be taken to where the article you last viewed is placed, without having to scroll down to find it and the URL will reflect the position you are at. On scrolling up or down the content is fetched asynchronously which helps you easily navigate through pages. This has all been implemented in JavaScript and jQuery and uses AJAX requests to fetch in new data.

The new theme we implemented uses the old database and renders its content in a new design. This way we didn’t need to migrate or import old content which had a positive impact on the project timeline.

A vast amount of content combined with a heavy use of JavaScript could have had a negative impact on performance. We used Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open source project from Google in order to have high-performing pages and consistently fast load times across all devices and distribution platforms.

Zühlke also wanted a responsive, pixel perfect design, optimized for mobile devices. We implemented several media queries, and serve each image format depending on the user’s screen resolution and device, thus optimizing content delivery.

Being an international company with clients all over the world it was important for Zühlke to have their website available in multiple languages. We used WPML to create and manage translations and make sure it will be easy to add new languages in the future if needed.

Our experience in working with Zühlke was both a very positive one and a good challenge through which we brought our contribution to a landmark project that gave a new dimension to what customer-centric design should be. Feel free to check the result and reach out in case you believe a similar approach can also help your business.