Architects working with architects
Founded in 1970, Stewart-Cooper-Newell Architects has developed a diverse portfolio with a wide variety of project-types across the United States. SCN is considered to be one of the country’s foremost authorities for the types of structures they design. Their projects include Local Government, Law Enforcement, Fire/EMS, Emergency Services Training, Correctional/Judicial, Commercial and Religious.
As there was a tremendous amount of information and media to manage with this project, it was a pleasure to work as information architects with commercial architects to plan and design a solution that they were happy with while, more importantly, maintaining the integrity of their goals using the same standards they employ in their own projects.
The Challenge – Maintain 1st page search engine rankings across 3 different web sites
SCN had immediate and pressing needs. They needed a complete redesign of their existing web presence. Their previous website was developed in early ASP and managed with Front Page. Also, they needed to launch their new web presence with a completely new domain name. Why was this a problem? SCN had years of credibility with search engines and already ranked 1st in search results for all the major keywords related to their industry. Maintaining that status was a top priority. To add to that complexity, SCN wanted to represent their focused areas of expertise across three different web sites.
The solution
Immediately Drupal was on the tops of our minds for this projects. Out of the box Drupal had expert capability to manage the scores of projects SCN had finished in their 30 year span, and it would have been a model that was easily reproducible across each individual site SCN needed. However, SCN wanted to keep their existing relationship with their hosting provide, and that provider did not have the hardware in place to handle Drupal – the sites would have been very slow.
Instead we created a custom solution from the ground up using PHP and MYSQL. A tremendous amount of attention was given to structuring the sites’ link architectures to intuitively handle their portfolio while implementing the SEO necessary to maintain their 1st page rankings in Google and other search engines.
The result is a well organize custom solution that seamlessly and quickly handles a large amount of data. We’re also happy to report, as is SCN, that they are still ranked 1st on major search engines for their industry’s keywords.
Art direction provided the Sumner Group of Gastonia.
- Visit the sites:
- Fire-Station.com
- LawEnforcement-Facilities.com
- SCN-Architects.com
