We're extremely humbled with the recognition our work for PJHM Architects has received. The latest award from the 2017 Hermes Creative Awards is a Platinum Award for Outstanding Website Design which is their highest award. This marks the fourth award that the PJHM Architects website has earned which includes awards from IAC (Internet Advertising Competition) for 2017 Best Architecture Website, 2017 Davey Awards Gold for Best Website, and the 2017 Ava Digital Awards Gold. We’re happy to see this work has paid off and look forward to more great projects like it.

As a long time client of ours, PJHM came to us with the idea of revamping the site to not just bring it up to speed, but to have fun with the project and make sure it was built to last. We were immediately excited with some of the concepts being pushed around for the creative, but were also excited with the possibilities of really pushing the build with latest technologies to achieve amazing performance.

PJHM was interested in using WordPress for their content management system, so we knew that we had some work to do. WordPress’s architecture is not known for performance or data normalization, so to achieve the kind of performance while still utilizing its strengths was going to be a challenge. After many iterations of testing stacks to build upon, we finally settled upon a LEMP stack using Roots, an open-source framework for Wordpress application development which allows us the ability to standardize our development through Trellis’s Vagrant deployments and Bedrock’s improved security and dependency management. Using this platform, we were able to achieve 100/100 scores on Google’s PageSpeed Insight (ironically enough) prior to adding Google Analytics own scripts for visitor tracking and performance which reduces the score by a couple of points. Google’s tracking file (https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js) which is deployed to millions of websites globally, does not leverage browser caching which directly contradicts with their own tool’s analyzation and score. Google has stated that increasing cache time would indeed improve site scores, however it would prevent Google from releasing changes to their script in a timely fashion. Oh the irony… Regardless, we were able to really push the creative without sacrificing in performance or security and achieve what we set out to do.

“Visual Identity Group came in knowing PJHM needed an online refresh based on mobile and video oriented platforms, in order to ideally highlight our architectural focus. VIG was consistently visionary yet flexible, data savvy, on tune with present and future trends, and provided an all around great energy throughout the process. Patient and accommodating to the specific needs of our industry, they come highly recommended.” James Bucknam, PJHM Project + Design Manager