Denver Amp Works is a local Colorado small business that specializes in building custom, hand-wired guitar amplifiers paired with a patented speaker technology. This project was a new WordPress website design & development effort to create a place where customers can research the products and previous amplifier builds, as well as custom order a new amplifier directly from the business. The products that Denver Amp Works builds are absolutely beautiful and are used by some music superstars around the world, and our goal was to create a site that highlighted the features and allure of a custom guitar amplifier.
Creative Design & Development
One of the key design elements of this custom WordPress website design project was creating an immersive experience within the site to really connect to potential customers, while at the same time implying the features and options that can be selected. One of the way these design goals were accomplished on the site was to have show changing background images with different finished that are possible on the amplifier cabinets.
We decided to show some of the most popular choices, including natural wood finish, classic black tolex, snakeskin textured tolex, orange tolex, and red tolex. This creates a subtle effect that draws the site visitor into the experience of browsing the site while implying that there are a variety of finishing options available.
Mobile Responsive / Adaptive Experience
The mobile responsive design considerations of the site included mobile touch menu interface, pixel perfect formatting of the site content and layouts, as well as persistent contact information in the header area with “click-to-call” so that mobile users can easily contact the business by phone or email. The site relies on Google’s material design mobile responsive framework which is an excellent grid-based layout framework which allows for flexible content formatting across device widths.
Additionally, we implemented some mobile adaptive elements that are present (or hidden) depending on the device and use case. The advantage of this is to only show the most relevant information to visitors depending on the reason they are visiting the site.
WordPress Content Management System (CMS)
Allowing the customer complete control over their new website is one of our most important goals on any website design & development project. Significant planning and customization goes into creating the perfect WordPress Content Management System (WordPress CMS) for each and every client so that it’s flexible, scalable, and easy to use. For this website & development project, the main enhancements were custom post types for products with saved layouts that allow easy control and addition of photo galleries and product features.
Control over forms across the site is another important consideration. Form fields, submissions, captcha, and integrations with 3rd party lead-gen services like Hubspot, Salesforce, Sugar CRM, and others are always an option on any new client website design & development project. For this project, we have a custom form integration leveraging Gravity Forms for both Contact and Order forms on the site, which have conditional fields and strong requirements to ensure the data submitted is accurate and filterable. These forms are also integrated with Mail Chimp for mailing list population upon form submission.
Logo Branding Animation / Video Stinger
Denver Amp Works creates ongoing video content to highlight their amplifiers on social channels like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. We wanted to help step up the production of these videos, and created a “logo stinger” animation that can be used at the beginning and end of all new videos to create a consistent brand experience across their video content. This was created in collaboration with the client to achieve their vision. We used After Effects software to create this stinger from their source logo branding assets.
About Denver Amp Works
Denver Amp Works is based in Lafayette, Colorado, and creates one-of-a-kind custom guitar amplifiers and amp cabinets for professional musicians across the country and world. All of their products are built by hand right here in the U.S.A., and are designed to last a lifetime of use in the studio or on the road.