Unlocking a Global Giant’s Digital Potential

Fortress is a company who specialises in delivering life-saving machinery safety solutions and has been in business since 1977, earning a market-leading position globally. Despite this authority, their previous website and brand did not align with their reputation. As an international giant, their digital presence failed to express the confidence and trust that their position in the market should command.

The combined task was to execute a strategic brand refresh that would then feed into the development of a future-proof, bespoke platform.

Creating a bespoke digital presence and strategic brand modernisation

We partnered with Fortress to execute a sophisticated, fully bespoke website built on WordPress using a highly customised architecture, specifically using the Elementor page builder. Our strategy focused first on modernising the brand, then empowering the client with a flexible digital platform.

Strategic Brand Refresh and Guidelines

When we started work with Fortress, they did not initially start with a plan for a brand overhaul. We proactively approached Fortress, identifying that their existing brand identity was limiting and constraining their potential.

They agreed to an update and we took the crucial first steps towards a brand refresh and modernisation. Since Fortress is a large, established global company, we understood they could not change the brand too drastically; instead, the project focused on modernising and expanding the existing visual language, this included;

• Comprehensive Guidelines: Recognising the scale of Fortress’s operations and its internal teams, we developed a definitive set of comprehensive Brand Guidelines. These detailed documents ensured that the newly refreshed visual identity could be consistently applied across all global communications, maintaining a singular, confident voice worldwide.
• Ready-to-Use Assets: To facilitate immediate adoption and consistency across all touchpoints, we created and delivered core resources:
  • Presentation template (for internal and external pitch decks).
  • Business cards (ensuring consistent professional representation).
  • Letterhead (for official correspondence).
  • Email signature (standardising digital communications).

These assets and the guidelines were formally handed off to the internal teams, empowering them to immediately and consistently apply the modernised brand.

The updated brand gave our design team the ability to enahnce and expand the website’s design, with a more modern and versatile brand.

Fully bespoke WordPress and Elementor website

We built the website in WordPress, using Elementor Pro at the request of Fortress. This was because the Fortress team had familiarity with the WordPress. They requested specifically for Elemetor to be used, as it gave them the ability to easily utilise the visual editor in Elementor to build new pages and update content dynamically, ensuring long-term self-sufficiency.

We also developed custom elements within Elementor that were tailored to Fortress’s specific needs to help them build their pages with bespoke sections;

• Custom Widgets and Blocks: We developed custom Elementor widgets and blocks tailored to Fortress’s specific needs, allowing complex product features and company information to be displayed consistently and professionally across all pages.
• Custom Data Types and Fields: Bespoke data structures were implemented to manage their extensive product catalog and technical resources efficiently, improving site maintenance and scalability.

Bespoke data structures were implemented to manage their extensive product catalog and technical resources efficiently, improving site maintenance and scalability.

Customising an advanced user role and access system

A major part of the project was implementing custom functionality for user management and secure asset delivery.

This started with us building a Custom Login and Registration pages from scratch, as the WordPress default versions were not able to do what Fortress needed.

Next came defining specific user roles that dictated what they gad access to, ensuring sensitive or proprietary information remained secure and targeted. The three main groups are;

• Customers – access to premium product downloads, only available to logged in users
• Channel partners – available to premium product downloads and documents for resellers
• Internal personnel – access to all data and can add additional documents and downloads

This allowed for a better management of users and segregation of the data to specific the specific roles.

Bespoke product pages and heirarchy for their modular systems

Fortress’s range is made up of modular parts to make a final product, this means what that can offer ranges into the thousands of variations. The website needed to demosntrate this flexibility and be able to handle and as WordPress’s standard structure was not isufficient for this, it would require custom development.

We engineered a custom product structure that allowed users to navigate and select modular elements efficiently. The hierarchical layout is set out as:

• Product Range Archive: A top-level listing of all modular safety product families.
• Product Range Landing Page: This custom-built page serves as both a product page and a product category archive. It highlights the main Product USPs and key features, and then lists the specific Range Part Products associated with that customisable product. This streamlines the path to customisation.
• Range Part Product Page: The final detail page for individual components within the modular system.
• We also built an optional Range Part Archive Page allowing users to quickly browse and filter specific modular parts. This custom architecture ensures the website accurately reflects the complexity and customisation inherent in Fortress’s offering.

A Digital Foundation for an International Giant

The successful deployment delivered a modern, informative, and cohesive online presence that finally matched the authority and professionalism of the Fortress brand. We still work with them on their website support, maintenance and hosting.