Project Summary
Houghton Chemical is a family-owned chemical manufacturer and distributor serving customers throughout the United States and international markets. Founded in 1927, the company specializes in heat transfer fluids, antifreeze and coolants, glycols, water treatment solutions, custom manufacturing, laboratory services, and bulk distribution. Its website needed to support a broad mix of product information, technical resources, service capabilities, industries, locations, and team content within a structure that remained straightforward for customers to navigate.
My Role
I worked directly with the client to reorganize the site's content and navigation around a more intuitive user experience, then designed and built the website from the resulting structure. My work included page design, custom iconography, WordPress development, team and news content systems, technical product tables, extensive image preparation, and hands-on client training so Houghton staff could confidently manage and extend the site after launch.
Design & Development Highlights
A major part of the project involved reconsidering how a large amount of technical and organizational information was presented. Houghton's offerings span several distinct divisions—including heat transfer fluids, antifreeze, chemical services, technical testing, and numerous industries—so I worked with the client to simplify page relationships and menu organization while still allowing visitors to reach specialized information quickly. The resulting navigation provides clear pathways into products, services, industries, technical resources, company information, and regional locations.
I developed a custom family of icons used throughout the navigation and supporting content to reinforce these categories visually and make a technically dense site easier to scan. I also designed and built the site's full collection of page layouts, establishing a consistent typography, color, imagery, and component system that could accommodate both marketing-oriented content and highly detailed technical material.
Several areas required custom WordPress structures rather than standard pages. I created custom post types for team members and designed reusable templates for news content, allowing Houghton staff to maintain growing collections of information without rebuilding layouts manually. Team photography also required extensive post-production: portraits were isolated from inconsistent source backgrounds, color and tonal corrections were applied where necessary, and each image was placed onto a standardized background so the staff directory would read as one cohesive visual system.
Technical product information presented another distinct challenge. I built complex HTML data tables for product specifications and styled them to remain legible and consistent with the broader website while accommodating substantial amounts of numerical and comparative information. Those web tables were coordinated visually with downloadable PDF versions of the same technical data, maintaining continuity between online and print-based product documentation.
An important final phase of the project was client training. I spent additional time walking Houghton staff through the content-management system, custom post types, page structures, and editing workflows so they could confidently update existing information and expand the site themselves. The result is not only a more organized and polished public website, but a system designed to remain useful and maintainable for the people responsible for it day to day.