A Modern, Lifecycle-Driven Website for a 125-Year-Old Engineering Firm

Discovery That Reframed the Firm's Positioning

We began with a deep discovery process, interviewing stakeholder groups across the firm, from leadership to the functional teams organized around each service area to marketing, alongside analytics review and competitive research. A clear picture emerged: the existing site's aesthetics lagged behind peers, its navigation ran three levels deep with menu items that often led nowhere new, and its project portfolio read as regional when the firm's footprint and ambitions are national.

The most important insight was about tone. Much of Weston & Sampson's work is infrastructural, and the old site presented it flatly, as if water systems, resilient waterfronts, and public facilities were commodity work. In reality these projects involve serious planning and design sophistication and transform the communities around them. The new site needed to project that sophistication the way firms with shinier deliverables do, while working honestly with the visual assets infrastructure projects actually produce.

A Design That Projects Sophistication, Built for Real Assets

The design leans hard into modernity: generous whitespace, bold typography, confident use of the brand's blues and greens, and motion throughout, including scroll-driven background color transitions that carry users smoothly between sections. The ampersand from the firm's logo becomes a recurring graphic device that ties the whole experience together. The homepage sets the tone immediately, opening with a rotating "Experts in" hero and an innovative feature that lets visitors live sort featured projects by lifecycle phase, jumping straight into the portfolio from the first screen.

Just as important, the design was built for the assets an infrastructure firm actually has. We created tiers of project pages, so signature projects with striking photography can go deep with rich, immersive layouts, while projects documented mainly through plans, renderings, or straightforward site photography get templates that present those materials attractively rather than stretching thin imagery across a design that demands more.

A Sitemap Organized Around the Project Lifecycle

The most significant strategic change was the sitemap itself. During discovery we presented multiple sitemap and navigation models, and Weston & Sampson embraced the boldest of them: reorganizing the entire site around the lifecycle of a project. The primary navigation is now five words, Plan, Design, Engineer, Build, Operate, which immediately communicates the full scope of the firm's services and gives every visitor a clear hub to land on based on where their project stands. Because Weston & Sampson works across such a wide range of project types, organizing by phase proved far more useful than organizing by category, and it was a genuine paradigm shift from the old architecture.

A flyout menu keeps quick paths to specific services, projects, and company pages one click away, so the simplified header never limits deeper exploration. It was a bold move for the firm, and one that the post-launch data has rewarded.

Interior Pages That Work as Hubs

The lifecycle structure comes to life on the interiors. Each of the five phase pages functions as a true content hub, pairing a narrative introduction with prominent animated stats, on-page navigation, featured projects filterable by related service, and connected news. Individual service landing pages follow the same hub logic, pulling together capabilities, featured work, and team contacts so a visitor researching climate resiliency or landscape architecture can go as deep as they need without hunting. The consistent inner-page navigation gives every major page a self-contained, explorable feel.

The company pages received the same strategic attention, with a special focus on employee ownership. Stakeholders were emphatic that the ESOP is central to who Weston & Sampson is: when you work with the firm, you are always working with an owner. The old site buried that story on a benefits page. The new site weaves it through the homepage, About, and Careers experiences and gives it a dedicated page with video storytelling and team testimonials, making ownership a genuine brand narrative for both clients and recruits.

Migration, Search, and an Interactive Project Map

Under the hood, the site is a custom WordPress build with a block-focused setup that puts everything, down to the scroll transition colors, in the hands of the Weston & Sampson team. We used our proprietary migration tools to move a massive archive of past project content into the new information architecture, reorganizing hundreds of projects into the lifecycle structure and mapping comprehensive 301 redirects so the firm kept the search equity its old URLs had earned.

Two features make that content archive genuinely usable. A Typesense-powered dynamic search delivers fast, accurate results across the site, and a Mapbox-driven interactive project map lets visitors explore the full portfolio geographically, filtering hundreds of projects by keyword, service, and industry. For a firm actively expanding into new regions, the map does quiet strategic work, making the national footprint visible at a glance.

Strong Results Right Out of the Gate

New sites often see a temporary traffic dip while search engines recalibrate. Weston & Sampson defied that trend. In the first six weeks after launch, comparing year over year:

• Direct traffic increased 42%, organic search traffic 36%, and referral traffic 89%
• Search impressions grew 14% month over month, from 500,000 to 570,000
• Google rated 100% of the site's URLs as "Good" for technical health across mobile and desktop
• High-intent commercial terms jumped in the rankings, including gains of 38 positions for "engineering firms boston" and 50 for "remediation boston ma"

Beyond the numbers, the site now presents Weston & Sampson as what it is: a sophisticated, national, employee-owned firm at the top of its field, with a digital platform built to keep pace as it grows.

Related AEC Website Designs

NMC has deep experience with architecture, engineering, and construction firms, and it's a sector we genuinely love working in. You can see related work in our case studies for the award-winning McAdams engineering website and the Kohn Pedersen Fox architecture website, or explore our full B2B web design portfolio.