Wild Country
Go wild in the country. The new climbing equipment website that takes the lead - Online technologies, social networking, multi-languages and products climb up the world's search engines.
Unleashing as many features and functions as we could was great fun.
The Client
Wild Country design, manufacture and sell high quality, highly engineered climbing equipment worldwide.
The Brief
To redesign the website from top to bottom with much more focus on the end user's requirement. There was to be no restriction on functionality to be made available to the designers.
Aims and purpose of the website
Primary
To increase sales.
Secondary
To further develop a wild country brand loyalty through social media and networking.
To create an easy to use website that retains its reader's interest and attention.
To create a central resource for storing and allowing easy access to full product information.
To create a clear presentation of the product's market leading features and benefits.
The Process and Challenges
• Porting across a previously successfully ranked website
Retain and develop ranking with search engines - creating links from old site to new site
• To create a truly international website that sells climbing equipment worldwide
The Skills
Design
Coding and Development
CMS (Content Management System)
SEO
E-commerce ready
The Requirements
Languages
• To create a genuine multi language system with full CMS control. The system had to work in all languages for all pages and all products, be maintained from one central CMS system from one page. In addition all language pages and products would need to positively affect rankings.
• The different language sites needed to automatically load from each country, i.e Spanish site needed to load for Spanish visitors.
Social Networking and Media
• Vimeo / YouTube - Specific feeds to the home page
• Vimeo / YouTube - Feeds to specific pages
• Picassa – Specific galleries feeds to the home page
• Twitter - Main tweets to feed to the home page
• Facebook - Specific feeds to the home page
Product Pages
• Multiple image type display - Facility to display images from many file formats including, png, jpeg, animated gifs and swfs
• Ability to associate 'all products with all pages' and 'all pages with all products' across the whole site
• Social Networking 'likes' and 'comments' to each product page
• To create unique URL for a product page when products associated with multiple pages
Downloads and Media Area
• To create a dedicated area for media resources incorporating popular social media websites and online storage
Onsite search
• Extended onsite 'smart search' algorithm that presents a quick search onsite with a series of prioritised results
Store Locator
• To create a fast worldwide lookup of suppliers and stores of Wild Country equipment around the world. Go to store locator >
The Outcome
Within the first month of launch:
More than 50% increase in visitors in first 3 weeks.
Best competition response ever.
SEO rankings maintained and improving.
Testimonial
'Traffic has increased, people love our new layout and design and our videos are a big hit. Overall our site is simpler, more effective and easy to manage. It's hard to ask for any more.' Richie Patterson, Wild Country
