Built By Barrette

For three generations, the same family has guided Barrette from its early days as a sawmill in Chapais, Quebec to its current position as one of North America’s largest manufacturers of wood an vinyl products. With manufacturing plants in the U.S. and Canada, Barrette produces products for both the construction and retail business, distributing their highly popular Outdoor Living lines of fencing, railings and sheds through such retailers as Home Depot and Lowes.

The company may sound incredibly diverse, but it’s held together by the conviction that with hard work, ingenuity and integrity, nothing is impossible. They wanted their website to be just as strong and cohesive as their corporate culture. And they wanted it just as innovative too, existing in both English and French versions while being scalable and yet user friendly enough for the Barrette marketing department to keep updated. The project was as multifaceted as Barrette itself. And they turned to the one firm that they knew could get the job done. {e} house.

Working closely with Barrette, we put together a sleek design assembled around an intuitive architecture that makes navigation simple. We didn’t stop there. We made sure this content-rich site is as easy to update as it is to navigate. Like Barrette, we believe in innovation and so we developed a customized content management system based on Expressionengine. Barrette can now update both the English and French sites and can manage all future Barrette sites through the same system. We also made sure different internal departments can create their own publishing work flow, so human resources can publish job listings while the marketing department manages updates to the rest of the site. Then we got in touch with our inner globetrotters and implemented dynamic redirection based on geographic location so French speaking visitors arrive at the French site first. No one at {e} house speaks French, but we like to think we had the proper joie de vivre to successfully embrace such a fun and complex website.

Getting a grasp on large companies can be difficult. Fortunately, Barrette is a company with a strong corporate ideology in tune with many our own principles: namely, nothing is impossible. By combining a highly functional design and an advanced content management system, we helped Barrette bring together the company’s diverse departments under one easy-to-use, easy-to-update website. The result is a site that exceeded even Barrette’s high standards.