We helped a large manufacturing company bring together several fragmented websites together into one dotcom and one CMS — that is still being used several years later because of its simplicity and effectiveness to maintain.
A global diversified metals manufacturing company had a collection of websites resulting from numerous acquisitions. This led to their offerings being fragmented rather than presented under a single umbrella. The company wanted to redesign their dotcom and bring all of their websites together into one unified experience — where customers could easily find information about all of their products and services.
The company had an added goal of designing the new site in a versatile way so that their sales team could quickly and easily use the site across multiple channels to showcase the company’s product and service offerings to potential customers in the field.
Further, the existing sites had been built on different content management systems, which increased the cost and complexity of maintenance. By bringing all of the sites together into one dotcom — and one CMS — the company could simplify their content management and website administration.
The manufacturing company chose to partner with g2o to redesign their dotcom and evaluate and build a new CMS because of our depth of combined design and technology experience. We also brought significant experience understanding the needs of content management and collaborating with companies to implement SharePoint and other systems to organize and manage their online content.
When we began our collaboration with the manufacturing company, they asked us to think creatively and to explore fresh ideas for their dotcom redesign. They didn’t want an out-of-the-box solution. As a result, after doing user and stakeholder research, we created a solution for them that felt more like an app than a website. The site included a comprehensive database of the company’s entire product line so that customers could search for any product and find its specifications, along with marketing copy.
For their new CMS, worked with the company’s marketing team, who would be maintaining the website, to evaluate their needs and recommend a best option. Ultimately, we chose Kentico. This CMS offered the simplicity of maintenance the company needed by offering an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor so that content authors and publishers could edit the content right on a web page and see the impact in the design, rather than in a form field in the back end. It also offered integrated with their product database for the searchability they desired.
We set up the CMS for the company and trained their team how to publish and maintain their content using Kentico.
It’s been a several years since the dotcom refresh and CMS implementation, but both are still in use because the simplicity of the solution and architecture we provided has continued to be effective for this company.
