Rebuilding HOLLOWAY AMERICA
As one of the leading manufacturers in the pressure vessels industry, HOLLOWAY offers a long list of products and services. Because the audience is educated and technically oriented, prospective customers who visit the site expect to see detailed information on each product and service page. Addressing the relatively heavy copy needs while maintaining the ultra-clean feel for the brand presented a UX (user experience) design challenge.
Our initial UX research, along with our interface design experience, put us in a position to gracefully integrate the technical details HOLLOWAY customers want without sullying the inviting tone of the site. The result? A fully responsive website that's unmatched in the Company Newsure vessel industry.
That's not bragging—it's simply paraphrasing what the client hears at trade shows.
Our Goal: Build on Already Well-Established Success
More often than not, a redesign project involves cleaning up a less-than-lovely website that grossly underperformed and sent the client our way for an emergency rescue. In this case, we needed to refresh the design and user experience—without losing the momentum we had spent years maintaining.
The site we launched for HOLLOWAY in 2012 saw major success, with consistently strong performance in analytics such as average number of pages visited, length of stay, bounce rate, and, of course, number of user sessions—nearly 50,000 in total. Most importantly, the site served its primary purpose, drawing more than 10,000 sessions on the Contact page during the 3-year life of the website. That's a lot to live up to when tackling a redesign!
Mostly Serious, however, does not adhere to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. Nor does HOLLOWAY. So we set out to improve on a good thing.
Our Strategy: Renew and Improve
Our major focuses for HOLLOWAY's website refresh included instituting responsive design, which is crucial for any website at this point, and moving the visual language toward a drastically brighter tone. The decision to migrate away from the predominantly masculine feel—navy blue and steel backgrounds with black and steel elements—on the old site was two fold:
- The brand as a whole has evolved over the years and now more directly reflects the pristine quality of HOLLOWAY stainless steel vessels.
- The old site set a trend in the industry that a number of competing websites seemed to emulate in the couple years since we launched it. That was reason enough to set the industry standard again.
Our renewal strategy also involved simplifying the site flow (architecture / navigation) to streamline the user's path through the site. Finally, we opted to overhaul the content management system (CMS), migrating off the Symphony backend to a customizable Mezzanine CMS with the Django web framework.
We thought we'd have to go outside the Midwest for a site that reflects our craftsmanship, but with Mostly Serious, we found the quality of the coasts right in our back yard.
Randy Colwell, President at HOLLOWAY AMERICA
A User Interface Design That Showcases Simplicity
Along with informing the UX design, the strategy to simplify the site flow also influenced our user interface (UI) design. Providing additional technical information and downloadable materials on product pages let users move through the site in fewer clicks.
Again in the interest of a more efficient, more task-oriented experience, we designed multiple contact callouts into the UI on nearly every page. The numerous points of contact complement the design rather than obstruct other tasks users may have in mind, yet the options become readily apparent the moment the user glances for contact info. Based on years of UX and user behavior research, we provided varying types of contact callouts to ensure we covered options for varying user habits.
The improvements have increased our likelihood of compelling visitors to contact HOLLOWAY.
A Snowballing Online Marketing Campaign
Those visitor analytics noted above have a lot to do with the long-term success of our ongoing SEO strategy for HOLLOWAY. The SEO campaign, which involves monthly writing and link building, yields excellent results. HOLLOWAY ranks extremely high for well over 100 terms. The high rankings help introduce the HOLLOWAY brand to many people, regularly driving new visitors to the site. Once our SEO work draws users in, the beautifully simple new website holds their attention and helps keep those all-important contact emails rolling in.
Before we bring this case study to a close, we just want to say thank you to Randy, Jerry, Dave, and all our other friends at HOLLOWAY for the great partnership. What a great time to be working together online!
Press
For additional info on Holloway America's partnership with Mostly Serious, check out the Company News: