Gand Furniture
WordPress Website Design & Development
Despite being a leading manufacturer, Gand had a serious problem with their biggest asset: their website. Although 70% of their sales come through their site, it wasn’t fit for purpose. We achieved a 230% increase in conversions from a single product page on the new website.
An overview of the main challenges.
Being an eCommerce business, Gand Furniture spends a lot of money on PPC ads, so conversions are extremely important.
Their previous website was built in 2013 and web standards have changed a lot since then. As a result, there were a number of legacy design and UX issues that were hurting sales and severely capping revenue streams.
Of particular concern was mobile usability: some 72% of Gand’s traffic came from mobile and the UX was far from optimal. Clearly, this needed to be addressed and the site had to be modernized.
In an additional challenge, I learned that uploading new products was time consuming and painful for staff. For a fast-moving company that needs to continually edit their inventory, something had to change.
I fixed all the design issues and restructured the website based on data that had been collected over the years. The result is a polished, smooth digital asset that offers a seamless user experience across every platform.
Creative and data-driven decisions.
Analytics had been set up on Gand’s previous website. Because it had been tracking and collating data for some time, I was able to make informed, strategic creative decisions based on facts.
The user experience of any website is vital, so I needed to understand how Gand’s customers behaved. I installed Hotjar onto their old website and kept it running for 3 months. This showed the most important pages and helped me assess various customer flows.
I saw that there was a particular opportunity to make the most of hub pages. For example, Gand sells beds, wardrobes, bedside tables and drawers, which are all pieces of bedroom furniture. However, there was no ‘bedroom’ category page that customers could browse.
Doing this achieves multiple things. Most notably, it simplifies the architecture of the site and allows customers to see multiple, related products. There’s also an SEO benefit too, since a hub page can pass “ranking juice” from the company’s link building efforts.
I’m still tracking the user flows and measuring everything today, so that I can make sure that my initiatives were the right ones.
Increase in conversions from a single product page.
The old website used a comment system to allow potential customers to ask for more information about a product. Users had to check their inbox to confirm their address and because this forced in an extra step, it killed the conversion rate.
I developed a one-step submission form with intuitive CTAs and Gand enjoyed a 230% increase in conversions. It was a simple tweak that yielded huge results.
Quicker product uploading than before.
I built a powerful and fast backend for the website that makes it easy for anyone to upload new inventory and edit existing product information in seconds.
From images to specs, internal searches to product codes, we developed a solution that met the needs of a busy call center.
A vastly improved user experience.
Putting the customer first, we made the shopping experience intuitive, fast and simple. We altered the layout of the category pages by changing the 4-column layout to a 3-column one.
This shift, together with the product codes on the archive pages, allows customers to choose or not choose certain products.
The larger images improve their capability to make a purchase decision, whilst they always have the product codes in view (in case they want to contact Gand and ask a question).
George is a true professional in every aspect of his work. He redesigned our business website from scratch and completely transformed our digital presence.
We have been receiving more online orders than ever since the day we launched the new website. It cannot be accidental.
We have been working together for years and the work he’s been doing is outstanding.
Design from scratch.
I created and developed the website from nothing so that I could tailor the whole experience to the business and meet all their needs. When developing websites, it’s important to combine art and science. My creativity will help you stand out, but everything’s done for a strategic reason.
Custom WordPress development.
We made a custom theme, with everything planned around the native WordPress Gutenberg editor. The site is lean, secure and it’s been built with longevity in mind. We implemented powerful caching that stores frequently executed queries of 1,000+ product pages to the database, and reuses them for improved performance.
Effective landing pages.
Gand runs multiple PPC campaigns and many of them are seasonal. I created 2 templates that are easy to set up and adjust. They offer flexibility for special promotions, but the key thing is that they generate revenue. The landing pages I develop are designed with conversion rate optimization firmly in mind, but tracking is enabled on them too, so we can endlessly iterate to try and improve the conversion rate.
Website care & Ongoing support.
I don’t believe in handing over a website and ending the relationship with my clients. For Gand, I provide ongoing website support (daily updates, backups, performance monitoring and more) paired with high-quality managed WordPress hosting, so they can get everything under one roof.