Case Study: Making an Old Store Look Like New
Client: Autofab
About the Company
Autofab has been in business since 1977 building custom cars and trucks. It is a full fabrication shop with an off road product line for shops and home builders.
The Challenge
Client had a very popular website in its niche, but it had a very outdated design and layout. Also, it was not optimized for SEO. The problem was that the website was built on top of an old eCommerce platform that it was not easy to customize and optimize. Also, the website was not responsive, which started to cause problems in Google Organic reach. And due to the fact that there was a lot of existing custom data and the client desired to stay with current eCommerce system, switching platforms was not an option.
The Strategy
After careful analysis of the eCommerce platform, we saw that even tough it was limited and did not provide access to most source files, we would be able to customize it to cover the needs of the client. We proposed an improvement to the user interface, layout and navigation. We would also be able to do SEO improvements and meta tag optimization. Since the website was not mobile friendly, we also proposed implementing a responsive layout.
Project Results
We drastically improved the user interface of the website by implementing visual elements in the homepage, like a hero image. We also redesigned the main menu, and added visual navigation for Vehicle and Product categories.
Many internal pages were also redesigned with a new visually focused layout, when before all they used to show was bulleted lists.
To improve SEO, descriptions were added to main product category pages, and meta tags were optimize all over the site.
Before
After
Old homepage lacked visual appeal and its content was made up bullet lists.
New homepage has a nice hero image to capture attention. Also, bullet lists were replaced with sections with photos for better navigation.
Old Services page was only a bulleted list of services.
New Services page has graphic banners that visually represent each of the services offered.
Old About Us page had a very plain text only description.
New About Us page includes a photo of the store front and recent Yelp reviews.
Old website was not mobile friendly.
New responsive layout provides a better user experience on mobile devices.