Bedford offers an extensive line of FRP products and services. They use a pultrusion process to form fiberglass-reinforced polymer, or FRP, into a strong but lightweight profile that won’t corrode, rot, rust or warp. FRP grating and materials are used in a wide variety of applications ranging from industrial platforms, walkways and FRP stair towers to architectural projects, cooling towers, FRP pedestrian bridges, water treatment facilities and much more.
Bedford wanted to move away from fully custom engineering service, so it created a new product line called ReadySeries. The ReadySeries product line are pre-manufactured shapes, which the contractors could assemble on location. With the introduction of the new product line, we also rebranded the existing product line to PROSeries, which includes FRP Structural Shapes, Molded and Pultruded Grating.
With the addition of new and rebranded product lines, we need to rethink Bedford's messaging and drive traffic to them. Secondly, from our SEO research, a lot of traffic was going directly to the Inventory page, and skipping other important content, so we also needed to develop a plan to promote and drive traffic to, not only the new product lines, but also other sections on the site, like the News, Why FRP, Featured Projects, and Resources.
For this project I used Lucid Charts to create the sitemap (shown below) to create a visual of the site restructure.
I reorganized products to have three main categories: PROSeries, ReadySeries, Other. Made products a 3 column mega menu to help users scan the many products available. Custom FRP Structures ultimately ended up under Other Products (done after the original sitemap was created). Services was originally completely removed, but later brought back and placed under About as well as Other Products. News was also moved into the main navigation, out from under About, for more visibility. We created press releases and new articles to promote FRP products, as well as interlinking to products on the site.
We implemented 301 redirects for pages that changed URLs. This planning was done early in the process, so we knew what the URL structure was going to be.
We created new brand messaging: Built Around You, Built to Last, and Built for Productivity, moving away from Full Service Partner, and promoting the main producut lines ReadySeries and PROSeries. The new brand messaging was placed across three hero carousel slides. Each slide randomly displays a background image that reflects the brand message. The carousel is followed up by two sections promoting both products, option to link to the main product page or the individual products under each product line.
The old homepage promoted mostly just Bedford products, services and custom FRP structures. The website had a lot of important information throughout that were buried, so another objective was to promote supporting content to help sell their products and services. The following were the main content areas we chose to promote on the homepage: Why FRP, Featured Projects, Resources, and the News articles.
In addition to promoting these sections on the homepage, we also promoted this content throughout the site in various forms. For example, we created articles that focused on Why FRP and then added cross-reference links to the Why FRP page. We promote Resources on all the product pages by providing a button in the hero , and created a News component that would feature News articles specific to product page.
The ReadySeries and PROSeries product main pages use the same template. The ReadySeries subpages are their own template, and PROSeries sub pages have their own template as the products are very different from one another.
We added Quote Now and Resources call to actions (CTAs) buttons to all the product page headers — objective to increase traffic to helpful information, like Resources and increase the number of quote requests.
Due to working most of the information architecture and content during the hi-fidelity wireframe phase, there weren't very many revisions, layout wise, on the designs. The product featured images were used as thumbnails and hero images — colored thumbnails, and black & white background images in the product page hero.
I created the illustrations that ultimately became animations for each of the ReadySeries products to illustration the pre-engineered modular FRP structural products. I handed off the illustrations to our in-house Adobe Aftereffect guru, who was able to export them out as GIFs. This animation was placed on the main page of ReadySeris to illustrate all the products, minus ReadySpan.
Adding the new product ReadySeries and the existing FRP structures and grating under the new product category PROSeries, we needed to restructure how to access the Resources. Designed Resource categories in an accordion to simplify the page layout, eliminating scrolling, and allow the user to scan the page quickly to choose the resource they need.
An important objective was to increase quote requests. The strategy was to place a "Quote Now" call to action button in the header of all product pages, so it's one of the first call actions when coming the any product page.
We created conditional forms with Gravity Forms. If the user clicks the Quote Now button on the ReadySeries main page, it'll displayed a general ReadySeries form. If they click the ReadyPlatform Quote Now button , it'll display a ReadyPlatform specific quote form. This is done by creating a specific URL for each product which we can target in gravity forms conditional statement.
ReadyPlatform Quote Request Form URL for conditional form:
/request-quote/?productcategory=brpreadyplatform
Bedford was super happy with the redesign, and after the launch of the new product line, their sales increased so much for the ReadySeries product line, they had a hard time keeping their products in stock.
Creating the new Quote Forms helped their sales department identify exactly what products customers were inquiring about versus the previous general general quote form which forced sales to do follow-up calls to get more information before being able to send a quote.
