Case Study - PolarLight

Client: PolarLight Ltd
Website: www.polarlight.ie

In 2008 we undertook a redesign and rebuild of the PolarLight.ie website.

PolarLight fabricate acrylic block panels and serve the Irish and UK markets. Their product is a glass block substitute and is used in bathrooms, showers, kitchens, and elsewhere, as well as externally. PolarLight do not sell individual blocks, but sell prefabricated panels based on the size of the panel requested by the customer. Blocks come in a variety of styles.

(Screenshots below can be clicked on to view larger images).

Existing Site Review

Content

The existing PolarLight site had been online for approximately 5 years. The site had been amended many times over the years, and alot of additional text had been added to the site. We believed this was a fundamental problem with the site. Many pages had excessive content, and often the content was not directly related to the containing page. Visitors were often faced with too many options on a page with no direction as to which path they should take - there was no specific call-to-action. In these circumstances many visitors would get frustrated and leave the site, probably going to a competitor site.

Navigation

The existing navigation system was a JavaScript pop-out menu:  sub-menus appeared when a main menu button was rolled over. We felt that this navigation device was not user friendly. On the homepage this usability problem was confounded by homepage content changing depending on what menu item was rolled over. The menu and sub-menu categories were not intuitive with ambiguous wording.

Build

The site was predominantly table based, with excessive and repetitive code. As such pages were often slow to download and not as search engine friendly or accessible as they could be.

Our Approach

We reviewed the existing site and highlighted the issues we felt needed to be addressed in the new site. We requested existing site visitor data (website statistics) and reviewed these for clues as to how customers were finding and interacting with the site.

We addressed a number of areas including:

Content

We advised PolarLight on how site content could be restructured. Content was divided into intuitive categories and sub-categories of relevance to visitors. Page content was kept short and to-the-point where possible.

Goals

We helped the client identify goals for the site. The aim of the site was to obtain sales leads.

The first goal of the site was to capture sales leads by offering an online quotation service. Visitors entered their requirements and contact details in an online form which was sent to PolarLight in email format. These requests were typically followed up by PolarLight within 1 working day.

The second goal was to sales leads by including an enquiry form on the site. Visitors could submit a question along with their name and email address. PolarLight received this query in the form of an email, and this was typically responded to within 1 working day.

Both goals (quotation request and enquiry form) were tracked for effectiveness using Google Analytics (see below).

Design

Once content structure and goals were finalised, we could then design and build the site. The following is a summary of the elements addressed in the redesign and rebuild:

• We decided to implement a clean modern design in keeping with the client’s product image
• We simplified the navigation menu based on the restructured content
• Prominent image on homepage showcasing their product
• Tag lines accompanied the product image on the homepage
• Prominent call-to-action on the homepage – quotation request.  This call-to-action was carried through to other pages on the site.
• The site was rebuilt using CSS and HTML which had a number of key benefits - fast download times, search engine friendly site, accessible website, layout and style changes can be made quickly.

Visitor Analysis - Google Analytics

PolarLight were using the basic statistics setup which came with their hosting account to analyse visitor visits. This package offered little more than total visitors to the site, popular pages, and other data, generally presented in an inflexible manner.

We recommended they use Google Analytics to provide a more detailed and actionable set of data as to how visitors were finding and interacting with the site. PolarLight were given a login so they could view the comprehensive reports.   We enhanced their Google Analytics setup by adding filters to remove staff visits from the data.

We also set up a tracking system so we could determine the success of the quotation request and enquiry form features on the site. PolarLight can track the total number of visitors successfully submitting quotation and query requests. But they can also determine how many people start this quotation/query processes, but then give up and don’t submit a request. They can pinpoint exactly where along the process the visitor decides to give-up, and should a common pattern occur we can examine the process to determine what might be causing the abandonment (e.g. technical problem, excessive information requested from visitors etc).  

Hosting

The company had two sites – a .ie serving the Irish market, and a .co.uk site serving the UK market. Both sites were hosted within Ireland. We advised PolarLight to host their UK site in Britain so their ranking in search results by potential UK based clients would improve.