Velan





Velan, a global leader in industrial valves, partners with Takt to create a future-ready digital presence aligning with Velan’s innovation and legacy.
Bridging the Gap: Housing Affordability, Climate Change, and the Rise of Mass Timber
If you were to hear that housing affordability and climate change are connected, would you believe it or feel skeptical? If you’re scratching your head, you wouldn’t be alone. BCIT and UNBC in British Columbia have the solution: mass timber for high-density housing and building construction.
Advances in design and engineering now allow buildings made from timber to be much taller than five stories. And, so long as loggers harvest the timber ethically, the construction is sustainable, especially when compared to the off-gases that cement releases during the life of a building.
Recognizing the gap in this knowledge within academic, architectural, and construction circles, they knew they needed to do something to connect the dots with the right audiences.
With a clear purpose and vision established by the BCIT and UNBC teams, we were well positioned for success in creating a clear, concise, professional, and easy-to-navigate site that would become THE go-to resource on timber construction for professionals and academics across Canada and beyond.
Our process began with extensive research and discovery exercises, including interviews with key stakeholders and competitive analysis for content, keyword strategies, and SEO best practices.
Our research concluded that content had to be the top priority–the audiences BCIT and UNBC sought to attract were academics and industry professionals. Therefore the words on the screen needed to be of the highest quality and could not be sacrificed for aesthetic effects.
High-quality information is best when paired with high-quality navigation. Our UX team crafted a prominent and intentional navigation system, which included a well-defined content hierarchy. We established the hierarchy through headings, subheadings, compelling title tags for resources, and an intuitive content filter to allow visitors to drill down the content by discipline (for example, engineering, construction, developers, or planners).
Timber is a huge part of Canada and BC’s economies, and the content had to reflect this significance and the social and environmental benefits. We wrote the content to be clear and concise, with absolutely no room for verbose narratives.
BCIT and UNBC sought to inspire their readers to take action, share their knowledge, and walk away having learned something consequential. As such, our copy was focused on action-oriented writing, prioritizing the active voice, direct addresses to the reader, and calls to action to share insights and interact.
The website’s design had to compliment the content, putting function over form, comfortably sitting in the background.
The color blue features prominently throughout the site for its professional appeal, and we selected an equally neutral and clean sans serif font to compliment the color scheme.
Images are used sparingly and intentionally throughout the site and were selected individually from an image library approved by BCIT. We established precise guidelines to ensure that images did not distract from but instead elevated the content. If an image of a building is to be included, the image must be of a building that relates directly to the article’s content.
These design elements combine to make a site confident in its credibility, displaying content that appears clear, organized, and professional.
The Mass Timber Projects website was designed on WordPress with ease-of-use top of mind for ongoing maintenance. As the intent behind the site was to create a database of reliable, industry and academically informed information, we needed to build a site that could be easily edited while guaranteeing that new content would fit within the high standards that BCIT and UNBC had established.
The website has grown organically as experts within the timber industry and academic circles add information and interact with one another, sharing ideas, best practices, and research. Check out their site below to see how it all came together and explore the latest activity in the field of mass timber construction.