Experience Facades, a website by Script Monkey

A website we created for facade guru: Steve Daniels - "The Facade Whisperer"

23^rd March 2022

I really enjoyed making this site because Steve had some seriously cool content and this allows a slick design to stand out.

Please visit Experience Facades, a website for one of the leading experts in the facade game: Steve Daniels, "The Facade Whisperer", making the complex simple.

Who is Steve Daniels?

Steve has been working in the facade world for more than 30 years and is widely regarded as a leader in the field, with industry-recognised experience on super-high rise and geometrically complex buildings. These are the projects where the outer skin of a building is anything but simple, and where getting it wrong can be very expensive indeed.

When Steve asked me to build his site, the brief matched his own philosophy: order from chaos, sense from senselessness, simplicity from complexity. Facade engineering is a dense and technical subject, so the challenge was to present a wealth of knowledge in a clean, uncluttered way that lets the work speak for itself.

Why do buildings need a facade specialist?

A facade does far more than make a building look good. It keeps out wind and rain, controls heat and light, resists the wind loads that push and pull on every panel, and plays a vital part in how a building performs in a fire. On a tall or unusually shaped building, every one of those jobs gets harder. Mistakes are often hidden until the building is finished and occupied, when they are at their most disruptive and expensive to put right.

That is why clients, contractors and manufacturers bring in an independent expert who has seen thousands of details succeed and fail, and who can spot a problem on a drawing long before it becomes a leak on site.

What services does Experience Facades offer?

Performance specification
Condition surveys and reports
Site inspections and forensic investigation
Mock up witnessing
Factory quality control audits
Troubleshooting
Training, mentoring and lecturing

Between them, these cover the whole life of a facade. Performance specifications set out what the facade must achieve before design begins. Mock up witnessing means watching a full-size sample of the facade being tested, typically for air and water tightness and structural performance, before production starts. Factory audits check quality at the source, while condition surveys and forensic investigations look at existing buildings to find out what has gone wrong, and why.

That last point on the list is close to Steve's heart. He genuinely enjoys mentoring upcoming engineers and helping them become the best they can be, which is a big part of why the site has such a personal tone.

How was the Experience Facades website built?

The site is a single, fully responsive page that scrolls smoothly from section to section, so it works just as well on a phone on a building site as it does on a desktop in an office. The Experiences section features a gallery of more than twenty project images, each opening to a full size view, because with facades, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

At the bottom of the page there is a simple contact form and links to Steve's LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, so getting in touch is effortless. Fittingly, the contact section is introduced with a George Bernard Shaw line about the illusion of communication, a nice nod to how much clear communication matters in Steve's line of work.

Why choose a single page website?

For an individual consultant, a single page is often the strongest choice. Visitors want to know three things: who you are, what you do and how to reach you. Putting all three on one page, in that order, means nobody has to hunt through menus to find them. It is also quick to load and simple to keep up to date, leaving Steve free to concentrate on facades rather than his website.

If you would like a site like this for your own business, take a look at our custom web application development service. Facades are close to our hearts too, as our case studies on real time embedment design and 3D automation in facade engineering show.