We are pleased to announce the launch of a new website for Durabilt-Durbin. Durabilt manufactures cargo control, load securement, and material handling products to the highest standards available in the market. The old DurabiltUSA.com, developed as a BigCommerce site, showcased Durabilt's extensive range of cargo control, load securement, and material handling products.
Discovery
We met with stakeholders at Durabilt and discussed how the website was, or more accurately was not, serving their business needs. We explored the site's visitor journeys, user and administrator experience, and technical performance as well as the visual design to identify real needs. We also used a battery of tools to test their site for performance, SEO and accessibility issues.
Conversations with people at Durabilt helped us understand how their business used the website and let us zero in on what were the important issues specific to their business.
Then we developed a plan and got to work.
Design
Working with Durabilt, we created an initial series of wireframes to sketch out the layout and flow of the website. We wanted to update their visual design to present the company in a more modern way. We also wanted to make sure that visitors would be able to quickly and easily get to the most valuable content and conversions on their site - products and quote requests.
We delivered graphical mockups of a new design and navigation that stayed true to their branding and history but was more contemporary. The new design used a mobile responsive grid to give important elements space to breathe and introduce a logical order to the layout. We used callouts on the home page, an emphasized search field, and several calls-to-action to provide pathways through the site to the key conversions.
Development
To make sure that users would be able to quickly find what they needed from the hundreds of options, we revised the information architecture. By taking advantage of faceted search in WooCommerce, users could drill down by features, narrowing their options from hundreds to only the handful that were relevant to their needs. We also used WooCommerce's related products feature to remind visitors of options and add-ons that would be useful to the products they were viewing.
To make the product selection easier, we added a product comparison feature. We also broke up the attributes data of their products into semantic chunks instead of keeping it all in a few fields. This let their visitors compare products by differences and hide similarities.
We also introduced a new quote request system for them using WooCommerce and Gravity Forms with conditional logic. The user would fill their quote sheet as they would a shopping cart. When it was time to submit the request, the system would check several fields in the form to decide which sales rep should receive the quote request (while keeping a copy in the system and emailing one to the home office for record-keeping).
During the design and development phases, we made sure we were following SEO best practices to let them work from a solid foundation. Product pages had clear on-page tags and were linked consistently to guide search engine bots quickly and easily to important content. Since we were working with an e-commerce solution to display their products, we used rel=canonicals and rel=prev/next to make sure search engines could understand the paginated content properly.
Delivery
We used fully open-source solutions in the site's development and clean, validated code that followed W3C standards. We wanted to make sure that Durabilt would never again be locked into using a vendor because of closed-source, proprietary systems. We built a site for them that they truly owned and could take anywhere.
On launch day, our staff was on hand to troubleshoot as we transitioned the site from a staging site to a live website.
Mark Grote, Durabilt's Director of Marketing, was extremely happy with the results:
"I worked intimately with the Xeno Media team and experienced nothing short of stellar top notch progress, communication, and professionalism. The site does everything we need most efficiently and looks stunning. We could not be more pleased."
