When we first started working with Matthews, one of their biggest challenges was communicating their breadth and depth simply. When you have a global real estate development company with hundreds of team members working on different types of projects, it’s a lot for an outsider to process. After spending months tweaking their brand to help clarify and differentiate their position in a crowded industry, we shifted to apply that clarity directly to their new website.

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Define

Our define phase focused on aligning the new website goals with the brand strategy. We hosted a workshop with representatives from every division and region to uncover the website’s core goals, key audiences, and functional must-haves. This process revealed that while certain regions prioritized local culture and others focused on breathtaking architectural impact, the overarching need was consistent: to showcase Matthews as a single, global enterprise where unique, individual divisions do exceptional work guided by unified values. We needed to build a website to showcase Matthews as a cohesive global powerhouse while allowing local flavor to shine. 

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The overall goal: Clarify connectivity within the company and with the community at large

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Design

The design phase was dedicated to creating an intuitive hierarchy and visual system to handle the global complexity without sacrificing clarity or user experience. We structured the site navigation around the company's internal organization, defining the two key distinctions: Regions (e.g., EMEA, Canada) and Divisions (e.g.,Hospitality, Energy). This global-to-local hierarchy immediately established the company's breadth while providing easy-to-find pathways for users to discover specific services, making it easier for partners and clients navigating the organization.

To effectively manage the massive portfolio of projects and the global directory of team members, we prioritized advanced discovery tools. We developed a robust user experience centered on dynamic filtering and sorting, allowing visitors to explore content using multiple criteria like division, location, type, or city. We also designed a flexible data visualization mechanism, enabling users to toggle between a high-impact grid view optimized for high-quality project photography, and a data-dense list view for quick fact retrieval, ensuring the functional design accommodated both visual exploration and research.

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Deliver

Websites are living, breathing objects, and their success is ever-evolving. An important part of launching a new site is the moment we hit the publish button, which, of course, comes after hours of rigorous quality assurance (QA), including swapping photos and checking the functionality of every link across multiple platforms.

Ultimately, you don’t always know what’s working well and what’s not until the website is live and living in the universe. Updates and revisions are an integral part of the long-term process, allowing us to plan future, data-driven iterations that optimize the user experience. We want to the website to remain a powerful tool for Matthews.

The new website successfully unifies Matthews' global operations under a clear brand identity, while simultaneously providing distinct, manageable digital spaces for its diverse regions and divisions to thrive.

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