A long-standing family business, proud of their services and growth for more than 30 years, who wanted to work with someone they could trust for the next step of their journey.
The brief here was to take two old websites and combine them. Each site offering very different services but mentioning the other with links to their respective websites.
On first thought this may seem simple. To take the websites, improve their design and user experience (UX) and turn them into one great looking website!
However, the important point to remember here (as you should with redesigning or redeveloping any website) is to keep the traffic the two sites would have built up of years of being live on-line.
These were long-standing websites with lots of historical traffic that shouldn’t be lost!
The whole point of a website is to generate business, and if you lose that hard-earned traffic, even with the best-looking website in the world, you have lost valuable search and are essentially starting from the ground up!
The first task then was to carry out a thorough SEO audit of the website to understand which pages were getting visitors and ensure the structure of the website would maintain those visits. This means as best as possible keeping URL’s the same, pages and content the same, headings, titles, descriptions. All the same. Whilst looking at what opportunities we had and how we can grow traffic and response for Powerhouse Productions and the two sides of their business.
Whilst Powerhouse Productions are a long-established company in the event production and disco equipment hire industry, their websites didn’t showcase their brilliant work, high professionalism and amount of readily available equipment they had on offer. It didn’t upsell, encourage further sales and allow the users to easily navigate what they wanted to find.
Talking to the directors, it was apparent how good they were at what they did, and whilst they would always end up working with a customer once they were on the phone, the websites weren’t getting them to this point and so they needed change.
Competitor sites were better designed, seemed to offer more and looked more attractive as a business to trust – inevitably Powerhouse Productions could be losing out on business.
As with all our projects, we spent time with the Powerhouse Productions Team understanding their business, who their clients were, drilled down on what products and services they offered and most importantly what was the best return business for them. We reviewed the industry marketplace and discussed what we thought would work to best represent their business and bring in sales.
The results are apparent.
Combining the businesses into one website with understandable landing pages and giving the correct weight to the areas where traffic is driven most. The user has a seamless experience to find what they want; easily, whilst also promoting other areas of potential interest.
As well as the easy roll-over ‘mega menu’, to quickly view all the available equipment hire in seconds, we added simple design touches throughout to give the website finesse and promote a user journey.
These rollovers continue throughout the website highlighting the area being viewed, promoting user interaction over images and links.
The icons on the home page under ‘Equipment Hire’ adding simplicity to a search pinpointing what is needed with little effort and perhaps promoting further search within other categories.
We showcased the event production side of the business offering a clear and concise explanation of how it would be to work with Powerhouse Productions to instil trust into the potential customer. The flow diagram with cute icons instantly telling a story without further explanation – seen here in ‘The Process’ on the ‘What we do & How we do it’ page in event production.
Each ‘event style’ having it’s own landing page to build authority within the search rankings with event-specific information images and video on ‘what-how & why’ Powerhouse Productions are the event management company for their customers.
We made use of their stunning videos – The initial home page banner as you arrive on the site giving the page fantastic visual impact, telling a story within 30 seconds of how Powerhouse Productions could work for you. And further embedded these videos throughout the website on the landing pages to aid SEO and showcase their services.
Video and Image Galleries, Embedded Google Testimonials, FAQ’s, Case Studies, Venue and Client Logos, Meet the Team; all elements adding trust to the potential customer to see Powerhouse Productions as the Go-To business for them.
The development itself was designed to work alongside their own product systems, combing stock, orders, emails and much more. Utilising a commerce system (as an order system) with clear menus, titles and descriptions. All to aid the whole user experience.
The ability within the CMS (WordPress) now available to the Powerhouse team allows full control over every aspect of their website and day to day running of their business.
We migrated the website to our faster servers to aid SEO and promote better user experience when navigating the site.
It is now easy for customers to find what they want (or even what they didn’t realise they wanted) and place an order or contact the events production team.
The whole project was carefully planned, designed and developed for Powerhouse Productions to be represented in their true light and further grow their business to the next chapter of their story.
