Wide Span Sheds has been building sheds since 2000. It's the inaugural brand of the Steelx Group, manufactures through twenty six plants nationally, and sells through an agent network rather than direct.
Zimple drew on its experience designing journeys for new home buyers to create a considered path to purchase for Wide Span Sheds, helping customers work through the choices involved in planning a shed.
Nobody buys a shed off a page. They buy a span, a height, a door configuration, a colour, a location and an intended use. The difference between a machinery shed and an equine shelter is a set of decisions the customer often hasn't made yet.
The range covers five primary categories, two to three levels deep: farm sheds, garages and carports, residential, industrial and commercial, and kit homes running from fifty to three hundred and sixty seven square metres. Presenting that as a product list would have been useless.
The site was built as a set of tools instead. An interactive 3D viewer turns a decision that's hard to picture into one you can look at, and COLORBOND colour selectors handle the choice people most often stall on.
The quote tool is the one that changes the business outcome. It walks someone through dimensions, location and intended use, and what reaches the local agent is a brief rather than an enquiry. An agent who opens a completed specification is having a different first conversation from one who opens a name and a phone number, and the sale finishes locally either way, which is why the dealer locator sits beside it.
Around all of that sits a customer story programme, buyers' guides and an inspiration gallery, for the long stretch where someone is still deciding whether to build at all.
The colour selector makes that exploration concrete. Named swatches sit beside a large building preview, with the selected colour visibly marked. A customer can connect a manufacturer's colour name to the appearance of a whole garage, rather than trying to imagine it from a small sample. Keeping the name and the image together also gives them something precise to refer to when discussing the choice with an agent.
The quote form starts with the building type, establishing what the enquiry concerns before the detailed specification develops. This is a useful division of labour between the website and the local team: the interface provides a consistent starting point, while the agent remains responsible for the project conversation. The design supports that conversation by making the customer's choices easier to express, without pretending a configurable building is a standard retail purchase.
