Staying Visible with Great SEO
July 24, 2015Get To Know Stellar Account Manager, Romina Barbotsina
August 19, 2015New Website Alert! We’ve been hard at work creating a new look for the Formtek Group’s site, and it’s ready to show off to the masses. Visit www.formtekgroup.com and tell us what you think of the website redesign!
The Project
Formtek is a group made up of several well-known metal forming equipment brands that have each functioned with standalone websites for many years. After working on a few different digital marketing campaigns and getting a feel for how Formtek’s audience prefers to interact with the business, we presented a website redesign concept to Formtek’s team. Using a new site layout with a modern look and mobile-optimized functionality, we could unite all brands under a single website domain to improve user experience.
Formtek was on board with the concept from the start. They had been considering converting their sites to be mobile-optimized for some time, but had been unable to get the project off the ground. Jack Pennuto, Jr., Formtek’s Director of Sales and Marketing, had also envisioned a “united” website. “It just made sense,” commented Pennuto, “We’ve been trying to figure out a better way to bring all our website tracking together and enhance our SEO, but there’s always been this issue in that some of our brands have machine specializations. On the old sites, there’d be redundant information or redirection that would sometimes confuse our site visitors. With To The Point’s idea, we’d be able to streamline the user experience and take care of the other problems all at once.”
The Developer’s Challenge
Site mapping was extensive – and crucial
TTPM’s Lead Digital Designer, Leo Roy, took the reins on the website redesign and began with extensive mapping for the new site. “Formtek is made up of 17 brands in total. We knew some of those would remain on their existing platforms, but there were 7 brands we knew for sure would be brought into this new layout.” The brands being brought into the new site were some of Formtek’s largest, including Yoder and B&K. “It was important that we keep navigation easy for existing customers that know these brands and visit the site hoping to make a quick request, but also make information available for newcomers. Browsing by market would make more sense for that new group,” Roy explained.
By setting up a markets section of the site, new users could browse suggested machine selections based on their business’s focus and get started faster. Alternatively, they could use a new form compiled from investigative questioning usually performed by Formtek representatives, which ultimately streamlines the sales process by giving engineers a starting point for custom machine requests. “Between multiple brand link redirects, the markets organization, and the form functionality, the website map ended up looking like a big spider-web. The end result, however, was a straightforward and simple experience for all visitors. That’s what we were aiming for,” Roy concluded.
See for Yourself
After a few weeks of strategizing, coding, and organizing content, the website went live on July 17. Pennuto and the Formtek team were all very pleased with the result. “It’s been great, we’ve heard feedback from our internal teams and from our customers and it’s all been positive. We were really impressed with the responsiveness of [TTPM’s] team throughout the process, and I’m actually suggesting one of our other departments consider a redesign, as well.”
Check out the new site at www.formtekgroup.com on your desktop or mobile device and let us know what you think!
