Décor Lighting Sales last worked with Empower Ideas nearly a decade ago on what was then a state-of-the-art logo and website, but over time they found both were beginning to feel less modern and timely. They wanted to maintain their cutting edge image.

Additionally, Décor was expanding their content creation capabilities. But during the discovery process, we found that they were creating different content for different media and there were immense opportunities for synergy. For instance, blogs were only being distributed via the email list while videos were being shared just on YouTube and Facebook. A platform that would make it easy to create a central repository of all content would help to improve the return on investment of the content creation. It would also make the site easier to find with more opportunities for content to rank on Google. Finally, it would mean that followers could interact with Décor using their medium or platform of choice rather than being shoehorned into the platform based on the content.

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We recommended Webflow as the platform for this project because of its strength as a standards-based visual website design tool with full support for a content-managed database.

The project began with the branding and identity development phase, where we brought the Décor team through a series of exercises to understand and align on their brand and their goals. Our context briefing process set the stage for a successful relationship by providing an early stage for voicing likes and inspiration, dislikes, and Décor’s competitive advantage.Over the course of the following month, a logo emerged and a new brand system was built.

From here, our team was able to design a website that incorporated and complemented the new logo. We recognized early that most traffic to the Décor Lighting Sales website was coming from a mobile device and therefore adopted a mobile-first approach to design. The result is a site that looks great on iPhone, while also scaling well to larger displays.

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Once the visual mock-ups were approved, we began to build the site and its full back-end architecture into Webflow. By using Webflow, we were able to add subtle animations to enhance the designs and bring the site to life. As an added bonus, Webflow is a no-code platform that creates standards-compliant websites by itself, with only a designer and no developer, thereby reducing costs.

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Décor Lighting Sales has several more complex pieces to their website that are best stored as objects in a database. That includes their manufacturer lines as well as their service area. Since different manufacturers serve different states, one requirement was to allow for a user to select their state, then see the supported manufacturers and various information about them, including the product catalog. We accomplished this requirement by using Webflow CMS and Jetboost. Jetboost is an application that allowed us to easily build complex filters around the Webflow CMS database.

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Another use for the Webflow CMS database is the full-featured blog and training center. This database acts as a central content repository where Décor is able to store and share all of their content across their different media platforms and social accounts. They can create and edit the individual elements using Webflow’s visual editor. We also added guardrails, such as appropriate image sizes, content guidance, and more, to ensure that their content always looks great within the confines of the site and the style system.

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