2024 | Custom Website
Maplewood Lane.
Who is Maplewood Lane?
Headed by husband and wife duo Susie and Aaron Martin, Maplewood Lane is your go-to destination for thoughtfully crafted, builder-ready house-plan toolkits and honest, been-there-done-that advice that empowers you on your home-building journey.
The brief.
A Maplewood Lane home is “beautifully bespoke and brilliantly simple”, which was honestly the perfect overarching brief for their website project.
With this being a new business and the product still being defined in the beginning of this project, it meant the site needed to be flexible enough to grow as the House Plan Toolkits took shape. That meant design decisions needed to be made before the full picture was clear.
There was nothing to redesign or refresh for this website– it also didn’t need to inherit anything from the Aaron Martin Construction brand - this was a clean, from scratch build.
Two essential user journeys needed to be ticked off: an easy path to purchasing a House Plan Toolkit, and for those chasing guidance on their new home build, clear direction to their blog, The Nook.
The work.
Photography that gives you the feeling of being in a Maplewood home, visual branding by Your One and Only and copywriting written by Wild Spark Copy meant all I needed to do was sew everything together and let their homes do the talking.
Layout choices were a no-brainer: lots of white space to give breathing room to the photography and copy.
I used micro-animations to help draw the eye so nothing was competing with the homes themselves. Squarespace’s ‘Pinned block’ feature was applied to move the MWL brandmark as you scroll down the page section, as well as on photos to cover text which was unveiled as you scroll. It’s such an easy way to sprinkle a little bit of something special to your site without going overboard.
A big consideration to keep in mind with websites is that your pages can be accessed clicking through your site, or through an online search, meaning they need to be solid if someone has landed directly on them and knows nothing about your brand beforehand. For that reason, I really enjoyed putting together the product pages for the House Plan Toolkits. They became a ‘sales page’ of sorts, including a lot of information on the page, but still fit perfectly as standalone pages, giving you the full experience of the Maplewood Lane brand.
The outcome.
This website may have begun without a fully-formed purpose, (and no in-person meetings!), but we built something that felt exactly right for the brand. Suz has also been able to tweak her site since handover, adjusting colours and copy as the brand has evolved without needing to come back to me. And that my friend is all I can hope for on my builds. 🥰
