All Weather Roofline (AWR) is a company that specialises in uPVC fascia’s, soffits, bargeboards, guttering, windows and doors. They are a successful company in their field, but found most of their custom was by word of mouth. The company felt that they could be losing customers by not having a strong web presence, so they turned to The Cybermill to help them create a modern, search engine friendly site that would properly represent them as a professional and reputable company.
When we first looked at their old site it was easy to see why the company was struggling to be found; their site had been built using a JavaScript-generated navigation (all the links in the main navigation where created by a programme rather than using traditional plain code). This has a devastating effect on their search engine ranking as search engines struggle to read JavaScript. In the past search engines could not read JavaScript at all, meaning they would only find the home page and the rest of the pages would all effectively be invisible.
The old AWR website suffered from poor search engine visibility, greatly limiting customer traffic and the potential for first-page results.
The Brief
AWR wanted to refresh their business brand for the new website – keeping things more or less similar to their old branding but improving and modernising their logo and colours.
- They wanted the new design to use cloud imagery as they had already been incorporated across their promotional materials.
- They wanted to keep the site simple and make it easy for the search engines to find.
- They wanted a visitor to be able to request a quote from every page of the site.
- Because the company has offices in Coventry, Doncaster, Northampton and Nottingham they needed to feature highly in search engine results when people looked for fascia’s in these and their surrounding areas. This is a big ask, so we had to come up with a Search Engine Optimisation strategy that would give it a chance.
The Design
We started by refreshing the logo. This involved making it more compact so it would fit nicely in the corner rather than splashing it all the way across the top of the site. This would keep the top of the site quite clean with a big ‘call to action’ in the right-hand corner (their phone number). We encased the logo in a grey circle and added an outline on the big tick; we also removed the shading on the tick helping to create a cleaner, more defined logo.
We also introduced a shield shape to the design to represent what the company offer (shielding your house from the rigours of the weather). We designed shield shaped icons with elements of houses in each of them, relating to each of the main links and used them as icons in the main menu.
We wanted to make their site stand out from all the other companies that offered a similar service as theirs. The brand refresh had created a very different colour pallet to any of AWR competitors; grey, orange and blue would give the site a very striking look. To aid the search engine results we created a bulleted list right at the top of the website; it would appear on every page and would be written to contain all their keywords. Putting it here meant that it was the one of the first things the search engines would come to, so it would be given a higher priority to the rest of the body text.
‘Request a quote’ feature
We also included a slideshow at the top of the page to give the site a dynamic feel but also to include their keywords again enforcing their product ranges and their finance deals. We decided to split these in to two slideshows so they didn’t become confused. A big side show would show AWR products with corresponding images and a smaller one would display their finance packages, this would be inside the shield icon designed giving the idea of protection.
When it came to laying out the pages we realised there wasn’t going to be a lot of information on each page, which can also effect the sites Search Engine ranking so we decided to put the produce information in a tabbed format, which cut down the number of pages and increased the amount of copy on each pages makings them a lot more attractive to the search engines.
Outcome
It has now been a month since the site went live and the signs are encouraging, the search engines seem to have responded well to the new site ranking it a lot higher than where it was. There is still a long way to go to getting the site to rank highly though – search engine optimisation (SEO) is extremely competitive and can never really be considered complete. In the next few weeks we are going to start looking at how it is performing in a more detailed manner and will be making recommendations on how the site can improve its performance.
