North & Co.

Inbound leads were high quality but poorly qualified: contact forms produced one-line emails with no project scope. Sales spent first calls asking questions the website could have answered.

The studio’s work spans product, brand, and campaigns; filters had to reflect how buyers search, not how the team organizes internal folders.

Editors update case studies weekly; layouts cannot require a front-end dev for every new project page.

Visual design had to stay restrained—large media, quiet typography—so work remains the hero.

We interviewed the principals on how RFPs actually start: often with a forwarded link and a 90-second skim. That implied strong page hierarchy: sector → outcome → proof → contact, with scannable bullets, not long essays.

We cataloged competitor studio sites and tagged patterns: timeline case studies vs. hero-only portfolios. North needed the former with better filters.

A case study content model enforces the same bones every time—challenge, approach, outcome, deliverables—while allowing flexible media within sections so projects don’t look templated to death.

Filtering combines industry tags with engagement type so prospects narrow without hitting dead results pages.

Contact routes include structured fields (budget band, timeline, role) that reduce noise without feeling like a government form—progressive disclosure keeps the first step lightweight.

Redirects and internal links were audited so old project URLs still resolve after migration.

The team could publish new work on a predictable cadence; case study pages stopped breaking layout when embedded video ratios changed.

Inbound messages arrived with more context, shrinking back-and-forth before meaningful calls.