Digital With Antwerp City Brewery
Interactive website for an interactive brewery
background
- client
- Antwerp City Brewery
- industry
- Food & Beverages
- services
- concept / design / development
- live site
- dekoninck.be
If you’re ever in or around Antwerp (the unofficial capital of Flanders), be sure to visit a pub and ask the bartender for his best local suggestion. 11 times out of 10, he’ll serve you a ‘Bolleke’. This iconic beer has been around since the 1800s. A couple of years ago, the De Koninck brewery —where the amber-colored Pale Ale is still brewed today—was transformed into an interactive museum and experience center. Intertwined with traditional local shops, bars, and restaurants, it makes for a great day out for both young and old.
Yet, they were stuck on translating their amazing offline experience into a compelling online counterpart. *magic whoosh sound* Insert DWY! Needless to say, we were hungry (or should we say thirsty?) to take on this challenge.
navigation
to drop down or not to drop down
During our research, we narrowed down the site’s content to four big chucks: the brewery guide, the beers themselves, shops and stores, and everything event-related. But with the brewery guide as the main conversion point and source of income, the marketing people wanted to prioritize this visually, yet without making it look obviously unbalanced.
The solution? A custom-coded hybrid between tabbed navigation and a classic dropdown.
make it fun and frivoulous
make it fun and frivoulous
Fun and playfulness has always been at the heart of the ‘De Koninck’ brand DNA (in Belgium, we say ‘met nen hoek af’ - with a corner off). We extended this characteristic throughout the site in a couple of ways:
- frivolous sayings pop up throughout the site
- the beer bottles are slightly animated and masked inside the first letter of each brand to give a 3D-ish feel
- the renowned ‘Antwerp Hand’ guides visitors through the site
- call-to-actions are not just plain buttons, but Belgian-style road signs, a small teaser of the same humor present in the interactive brewery tour.
high-converting content
adding our secret sauce
Looking back at the content on their previous website, most of the pieces of the puzzle were somewhat already there. It was just waiting to be solved. So we rewrote, restructured, and reorganized their content to be more informative, visually appealing, and conversion-oriented.
powerful CMS
1 2 3, as simple as do re mi
The site was built on Craft CMS. Its fast, flexible, secure, multi-language is a breeze. Basically, the kind of CMS that will make you *actually want* to update your website’s content. We sat together with De Koninck’s marketing team for a brief introduction into the site’s backend and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
