For the last year, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes creating a brand new website for Scottish Wood — rewriting content, upgrading our photography, and rethinking how we present ourselves online.
As well as showcasing our products and services, for a small business like us our website is how we communicate who we are, what we value, and the work we do. We wanted this new site to better reflect Scottish Wood today: the people behind it, the timber we work with, and the ethos that has guided us for nearly 30 years.
Read on to hear a little about the journey behind the new website, and how the Scottish Wood brand has evolved over the years.
The Scottish Wood brand through the years
We’ve been in business for almost three decades, and our visual brand has had slight changes and adaptations over that time. If you’re a long-term customer of ours, you may recognise some of the previous evolutions of our logo!
Developing our visual identity
In 2024, we worked with designer Igua Cuiral to refine and develop Scottish Wood’s visual identity.
Alongside refining our brand, the goal was to create a clearer and more consistent visual language that could be used across the whole organisation – online, in person, and across our printed material, signage, and communications.
At the heart of the brand is our Celtic knot tree logo, originally designed by Scottish Wood co-founder Maggie Birley.
Over the years, Maggie’s Celtic tree has seen several refinements, but we’ve always wanted to keep it at the centre of our identity. It feels deeply connected to who we are as a business and stands as a lasting reminder of Maggie’s influence on Scottish Wood.
Maggie played a central role in shaping Scottish Wood into the organisation it is today. She championed the idea of establishing the business as a social enterprise and founded the charity Dynamic Woods, which became the sole owner of Scottish Wood. Much of the ethos, adaptability, and sense of purpose that defines the organisation today came directly from her vision.
Maggie passed away in 2018, but her presence remains woven through the work we continue to do.
Building the new website
After developing the new visual identity with Igua, we were excited to implement her design structure across our website.
This is the third iteration of the Scottish Wood website. The original site was built by Maggie in 2001 during the early days of the business. At a time when many small businesses had little or no online presence, the website was remarkably forward-thinking: simple, informative, and an important way of introducing Scottish Wood to a wider audience.
Years later, we launched the second version of the site using Wix, built by our timber shop manager Ros as one of her first projects after joining the business.
That website became an incredibly important asset for Scottish Wood. It allowed us to expand our educational content, improve communication with customers, and begin selling products nationwide through our online shop. Over the years, many customers have told us how valuable they found the guides, articles, and information available there.
But as Scottish Wood continued to grow, we increasingly felt we had outgrown what the Wix platform could offer us. With our new brand identity ready to implement, we got to work on Scottish Wood website 3.0.
Welcome to the new website
We’re pleased and proud to finally share the new site with you. It’s been a huge amount of work behind the scenes, and we couldn’t be more grateful to our designer, Igua, for the care, creativity, and attention she brought to the project.
We feel the new website captures not only what Scottish Wood does, but who we are as an organisation.
We hope you’ll take a few minutes to explore the new site — browse the updated photography, try the improved filtering system in our online shop, and check back soon for new blog posts, project updates, and educational content.
Meet the designer – Igua Cuiral
After working with Igua on our visual identity — along with several other design projects around Scottish Wood — we knew she would be the perfect person to build the new website.
Though this was her first commissioned website project, she approached it with enormous dedication and creativity.
Igua has an extensive artistic background spanning a wide range of disciplines: from studying at Art School in Spain; completing a degree in Film and Digital Media; moving to Scotland for a career in the film industry; and putting the finishing touches on her artist education with a Masters in Illustration.
That mix of artistic and technical experience made her an ideal candidate for the project – alongside designing and building the website itself, Igua also undertook the new photography featured across the site.
The result is a website that feels cohesive, personal, and genuinely reflective of our business.
Scottish Wood may have been Igua’s first commissioned website, but we highly doubt it will be her last!
Always developing
Like Scottish Wood itself, our website will continue to evolve.
Over time we’ll be adding more educational resources, blog posts, project updates, and practical information. Some content from the previous website — including our guides to Scottish hardwood species — hasn’t yet made the transition, but we plan to continue expanding the site in the months ahead.
We’re excited to keep building on this new foundation and continuing to grow Scottish Wood online.
Thank you to everyone who has supported Scottish Wood over the years, and welcome to our new website.
