Designing for Unity
BWConverting Website Redesign
Role
Lead Web Designer & Developer
Timeline
Summer 2024 - Spring 2025
Skills Exercised
HTML/CSS, Shoelace, Bootstap, jQuery, ASP.NET
The Challenge
When BWConverting asked me to merge their six websites into one, I quickly realized the challenge wasn't just visual, it was cultural. Most of these companies are over a century old, with unique histories, branding, internal vocabulary, and loyal customer bases. These companies needed to see themselves in this website, not be erased by it.
The question became: how do I create a unified platform that still preserves six distinct identities?
Pictured above: original company homepages
Explore my mind. The journey starts here.
Piecing Together Six Perspectives
As a newly unified platform, no one person fully understood all six companies' products or industries. I received rough sketches, vague descriptions, and conflicting opinions on page structure. Every conversation revealed a different truth.
To make sense of the chaos, I listened for patterns— where ideas overlapped, where they clashed, and where they could coexist. My role became part translator, part systems thinker.
So I treated the process like a lab:
- Wireframe experiments to test hierarchy and structure
- Multiple visual directions to pressure-test assumptions
- A combined "frankensteined" design once patterns emerged
- Iterations guided by regular cross-company reviews
- Click-through prototypes to stress-test usability and navigation
Each round surfaced new insights. I had to separate personal preference from structural needs, distinguishing what was tied to brand identity versus what was simply habit. Where individuality mattered, I preserved it. Where consistency mattered more, I proposed platform-level solutions.
Balancing these two forces became the backbone of the project.
Fig 1: Home wireframe
Design Can Be Beautiful And Accessible
A major early tension was color. Each company wanted their brand colors preserved and displayed in large, bold gradients, but most failed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines when contrasted with text and other important UI elements. Their vision looked beautiful, but would be inaccessible for many users.
Rather than degrade their aesthetic goals, I reframed accessibility as a design constraint that encourages creative exploration rather than limits it. I introduced three design directions that varied in gradient shapes and sizes, each one an accessible alternative to their original vision.
What surprised me was how quickly the conversation shifted. Once they saw accessible designs that still looked beautiful, the pushback faded. Beauty became less about color preference and more about inclusivity.
This reminded me that a designer's job isn't just to execute, it's also advocacy.
Fig 2: Home v.1 mid-fidelity design
When One Size Doesn't Fit All
As the visual direction solidified, I worked with marketing leaders across the companies to untangle the underlying content structure. With hundreds of products— each with different specs, industries, subindustries, and page requirements— the team had no unified map.
Some labeled the same industries differently.
Some required more product details than others.
And our content management system, Sitefinity, relied on templates, not bespoke pages.
A significant part of my role as web developer in this project was to set up Sitefinity so that the marketing team could easily populate and maintain the website independently. This meant constant iteration. As content was added, templates were revised, restructured, or simplified.
Approaching a solution without a perfect plan was uncomfortable for me, but it taught me that meaningful design isn't always linear. Sometimes it's messy, and requires letting go of perfection in favor of progress.
Fig 3: Home v.3 mid-fidelity design
Final Design
Outcomes
- I learned how to experiment quickly, show the team real options, and guide them toward alignment.
- I got better at advocating for accessibility in a way that felt collaborative, not corrective.
- I developed more confidence navigating ambiguity and the emotional dynamics that come with it.