Responses by Céline Duisit, web project director; Corentin Magnetti, web art director; and Jordan Thiervoz and Jordan Schutz, creative developers, Extra l’agence.

Background: For almost fifteen years, the French company Meetings has organized and offered equipment rentals for all kinds of indoor and outdoor events: congresses, conventions, trade shows and roadshows, exhibitions, and sports events, among others. Meetings believes nothing is impossible and every event must make people dream—especially after two years of a global pandemic.

Since the company has partnered with our agency for years, Meetings asked us to rethink its entire website to present its know-how, rich experiences and various products. The new website had to show the team’s penchant for innovation and its driving force to respond to all kinds of customer requests, from the most serious to the most extravagant. So, we reviewed the hierarchy of Meetings’s contents and worked on a modern and aesthetically advanced design.

Design core: The site is built around a central idea: users must be able to find any product they are looking for. Our graphic work consisted of highlighting the photos and conveying the feeling of infinite choices.

The search module best represents this concept: As soon as it’s opened, a rain of random product photos falls down the screen to inspire the user. When the search field is filled, photos in the background change to give a preview of the search result. This system highlights the variety of Meetings’s products even before the user starts researching.

Other graphic elements support this infinite effect: the repeated display of many product photos when users hover over the catalog categories on the homepage.

Challenges: Working on this project was very exciting! We were quite free on the design and art direction as the Meetings team trusted us, and we could propose strong graphic choices. We collaborated with a photographer to shoot the 2,000 products, and the photographic direction was really interesting.

We also met some technical challenges, particularly when optimizing the large number of photos presented on the website. We worked with the WebP format and managed the responsive images via the <picture> tag and the “sizes” attribute to improve performance and loading times.

We had some ideas we couldn’t achieve, such as pushing Meetings’s case studies further, increasing the selection of photos, working on the texts and writing more complete product sheets, and shooting time-lapse videos of the events to highlight the company’s knowledge. But in the end, we are proud of the result.

Navigation structure: We wanted to create a fluid user experience with a simple path, especially in the product catalog. The user had to be able to browse the site from product to product without having to go back and begin a new search. We were inspired by the biggest e-commerce websites and designed different modules to guide the user: similar and related products or products in real situations during an event. From a simple product search, users can discover different graphic universes to finally find that rare pearl they might not have thought of themselves!

Technology: The Meetings website was built with WordPress. Administrators can update the website’s content independently.

To provide the smoothest experience possible for users, we employed Locomotive Scroll to allow smooth scrolling across the website. We also used Highway to perform seamless page transitions. All the animations across the website use Greensock’s GSAP library and its ScrollTrigger plugin for the beautiful scroll-based animations on the homepage.