Bloom Media - a full service digital agency

Web design with a few innovative applications

The client

Recently acquired by Heidleberg for £8.2bn, Hanson are a FTSE 100 company and one of the largest suppliers of heavy building materials to the construction industry in the world.

Brand new online applications

Our research into the Hanson market showed that their audience researched and purchased building products online. There was a clear requirement to improve the Hanson website, and in particular, they wanted to deliver interactive online applications to help their audience choose the appropriate Hanson products for their project.

One brief was for the 'Brick Visualiser'. It was to be an application that would give their customers a three dimensional representation of Hanson bricks on a building, with the option to change the brick type and colour.

This was actually more complicated than first envisaged as Hanson wanted complete control of the bricks that would be displayed.

Cutting-edge content management and interactive applications

Bloom Media developed a new website including a bespoke Content Management System, 3d & 2d brick visualisation tools and brick matching application.

A bespoke development framework had to be developed to allow multiple web technologies to work seamlessly together, these included, Flash, shockwave and a derivative of ASP dot Net. The product catalogue allowed customers to browse bricks with ease using category and free search.

In order to meet the specific requirements of Hanson’s customers, functionality was extended to allow users to upload any image from their personal image library so that a search could be carried out on matching a brick in the Hanson’s product range.

The selected brick and mortar type could be then rendered onto real life building applications in a 3D environment in real time, enabling either an architect, Specifier or end user to visualise how the brick and mortar combination would look on typical commercial or domestic building development.

The Deliverables

• Content Management System
• 2D ‘brick visualiser’
• 3D ‘brick visualiser’
• Brick matching tool

Award winning solution ‘Best Technical innovation’

The new website brought the Hanson web presence in line with the brand standards, and allowed the product managers to easily update the site and maintain the product catalogue.

As part of an integrated Search Engine Optimisation campaign we were able to rank no.2 on Google for the key phrase ‘bricks’, increasing traffic volumes tenfold to the website.

In undertaking such an innovative approach to this solution we won the prestigious Dadi award for “Best Technical Innovation” for the 3D brick visualisation tool, something we are extremely proud of and is a testament to the skills of our development team who broke the mould on this project.

It is safe to say that we met and exceeded the expectations of our client.