Our Brand-New Website at TheStudios

If you’re a regular visitor to our little corner of the internet, you may have noticed that we recently relaunched our website with a whole new look and several pages of new content. Needless to say, we’re really happy with it, and we hope you find it more informative and easier to navigate too, whatever your reasons for visiting.

In today’s blog, we thought we’d take a little peek behind the curtain of why we wanted to update the website and how we did it, particularly as several months of hard work have gone into our new online home, ensuring everything was just perfect before we pressed the big red “relaunch” button.

Now that our luxury living high-rise is almost complete, with our final Skyline studios slated for completion in April 2024, we thought it would be nice to give our website an overhaul too, something that’s up to the standard of the community and neighbourhood we’ve all created here on Birch Street.

Getting the Ball Rolling

There’s a famous adage that goes “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” but this simply doesn’t hold true when it comes to standing out on the global stage of our always-online world. Things move quickly online and it’s all too easy to fall behind, both with the visible content on the pages themselves and all the behind-the-scenes magic that keeps a website running well.

So we turned to our good friends at Sherbet Donkey Media, who we have been working with for some time, to not only overhaul our existing website but to redesign it from scratch. Once we’d decided that we wanted a brand-new website, the first thing we did was hold a workshop with the team at Sherbet Donkey to discuss the first steps and get the ball rolling.

What We Wanted

Everyone on the team here at TheStudios is very proud and passionate about what we’ve created in our high-rise haven. While it’s easy to talk about what living here is really like, we also wanted to show as much of it as possible. So the first thing we wanted was a brand-new video upfront at the top of our new homepage showing off as much of our building as possible.

We also wanted an overall cleaner look to the site, more modern fonts and better use of colour. A smaller issue was that our old website was built around the idea of three different tiers of studio apartments, whereas we’re now offering four with our Classic, Deluxe, Premier and – soon – Skyline studio configurations.

Another ‘must do’ was to add more detail about the history of 24 Birch Street, its transformation into TheStudios, as well as shining a light on all the communal facilities that make living at TheStudios such a breeze, including the cinema and bar area, with more detail and many new, larger images too.

Sherbet Donkey came to visit the building to get a true feel of the atmosphere here and then took away our desires and requirements to begin their work.

The Process

The first we saw of our new site was in the form of a ‘wireframe’ – essentially a very basic visualisation of how the new pages would look for us to fine-tune and approve before the serious design work started. Once it did, we were then provided with a few variations of the style we’d chosen – very much a case of “let’s take this part of version 1, this bit of version 2 and the colours from version 3”!

We also received an intricate digital ‘sitemap’ which literally showed a colour-coded overview of all the pages of the website on one large slide, including how sections would link together. This was a work of art in itself, but really helped us visualise how our new site was going to function.

Once this was all approved, the next we saw was a full mock-up of the site you now see. This was an exciting moment for us, as it allowed us to play with the new site, visit all the pages and see how the whole thing would work together. It also provided another opportunity to fine-tune details and ensure we had covered everything we really wanted to include.

The Small Matter of Matterport

We’re all incredibly passionate about what we’ve created here and could write about TheStudios late into the night until we fell asleep at our keyboards! We also love all our new photography – but what we really wanted was to give potential residents the ability to virtually walk around the building for themselves, both for the communal ground floor areas, communal kitchens and our different apartment layouts.

This was achieved through a technology called Matterport, which images each required area in 3D and then stitches them together to create a full tour that you can walk around for yourself. Needless to say, we were very pleased with the results, which you can see for yourself.

Continuing to Grow

While the primary function of our website is to shout about our fantastic luxury-living block to potential new residents, we also keep our new-look blog fully up to date with all the upcoming events here at TheStudios as well as further afield in and around Wolverhampton. We even occasionally post insider info such as this blog, for those who are interested!

Current residents will also find all the information they need about our facilities and processes – including our moving in guide. This is just the beginning too – we’ll be continuing to add new pages and services as we continue to take community living to a whole new level.