The Ruthman Companies website

This was the first website that I built for Ruthman Companies. The company had already been working on a new website build when they hired a new Director of Marketing, Lisa Wallner.

Visit the Ruthman Companies website (opens in a new tab).

Taking over the build

The new website had been underway for a while. A design had been done and approved by the Ruthman board of directors. But the build was slow and becoming expensive.

When Lisa was appointed as Director of Marketing she contacted me and asked if I could take over.

The website had been built using a purchased theme that enabled the developers to make a lot of customisation. However, I do not like to use other people’s themes. They can often be cumbersome, complex to edit and quite slow to load.

Rebuilding the site

As I had a design that was already agreed I could quickly recreate it, more or less exactly. I used stripped down code that would be quick to load and easy to edit, both for me and for users.

I then worked very closely with Lisa to develop all the pages that had not been worked on by the previous website company.

The main menu was developed and eventually included three different types of hover menus. There are the classic, conventional drop down menus. In addition, there are two different mega-menus, one with a list of brands broken into brand types, the other a list of applications including images.

In the footer I integrated a Constant Contact form (opens in a new window) to aid the company’s email marketing. I was asked to hide most of the fields, for both aesthetic reasons and to improve sign-ups. This was easily done with a little bit of JavaScript.

Custom Post Types

I created plugins for two different Custom Post Types.

One Custom Post Type was for the Leadership Team so that each member of the team could have a page dedicated solely to them.

The other Custom Post Type was for the Careers section. This enables Ruthman to easily add new positions that are available. They automatically appear on the Careers page but also have their own dedicated page which includes the ability to upload a CV or work history.

Reception

Lisa was very pleased with the speed the site was developed. On the launch of the website she posted this on LinkedIn.

I’m so excited to have crossed the finish line and gone live with this website redesign. I could not have done it without the help of our corporate team and divisions. Many thanks to the brilliant Craig Murray who built it from the ground up in record time!

Lisa Wallner
Director of Marketing at Ruthman Companies

Since then, as you may have seen from my portfolio, I have worked on several more websites for the Ruthman brands.