Keeping on Track With Cautrac

Originally founded in 1994 as one of Europe’s largest stockists of new construction equipment, Cautrac are a leading UK supplier of construction machines and parts, and the continent’s largest supplier of new and used tracked dumpers (crawler carriers).

With offices based in Colchester and Bolton, they’re well known within their industry. They also supply a large variety of used heavy construction machinery, with more than 300 used machines in stock between depots. Stocked brands include: Morooka, Yanmar, Hitachi, Komatsu, Mitsubishi and Kubota.

Cautrac found Fever online and approached us to design and build a new website for them. The brief was to completely overhaul their website with improved design, navigation with easy access to products and services in particular, and, of course, making it multi-device friendly.

With the sitemap established, we moved onto the basic structure of the site using a wireframe design. Wire-framing a website is vital to our process, because it helps us plan content structure and user navigation ahead of the design phase. This is also useful for the client to have an idea of how the site will be laid out for smaller devices such as smartphones.

With the wireframe confirmed, we moved onto design. It was clear from the offset that most users of the site would be stereotypically male, heavy-handed, fried breakfast, builder types. Therefore, we knew the navigation had to be no-nonsense, easy-to-use, with bold type and good levels of contrast throughout.

Without reinventing the wheel, we had some creative freedom with the brand style of Cautrac. We introduced yellow to the colour palette as it was the dominant industry colour, without making it look too much like another certain yellow-specific brand!

From the early stages of design, bold colour and strong typography paved the way for the rest of the site. Coupled with professionally, studio-shot heavy machinery – all the elements came into place for a bold and engaging site.

Built in WordPress, (we love WordPress!), the development of the website was overseen mostly by Cautrac’s Dan Cawley. We managed the integration of their Mascus system, which handled Cautrac’s used equipment database, similar to an e-commerce platform. We catered for some changes throughout the build and offered training so that Cautrac could confidently manage their website going forward. The fantastic results speak for themselves.