Case Study - Selected Work

The Problem

Steel Images, Inc. (SII) wanted to bring their wholesale products to the retail market. At the onset of the project, they had an impressive catalog which SII had spent considerable amounts of time, money, and energy creating. However, this catalog was directed towards those in the wholesale market.

In order to stimulate business from the retail market, SII needed to provide this information to the general public. An obvious way to do this would have been to simply transfer the design and data from the catalog to a website. However, while it was important that the work invested in the catalog be represented in the new website, it was also critical for the website to maintain both the expected level of interactivity (e.g. shopping cart functionality) as well as a traditional web experience for the visitor.

Another important consideration was expanding the use of the website to incorporate wholesale buyers as well. This required the site to be built with a separate area for wholesalers while maintaining a consistent and enjoyable user experience across all areas of the site. This would allow for both the retail and wholesale facets of SII grow with the implementation of this new website.

Both the retail and wholesale areas of the site needed to accept orders via credit card, as well as offer shopping cart features, and perform necessary shipping functions (e.g. shipping calculations). With the incorporation of these features, SII hoped to offer a compelling user experience for all their visitors, as well to streamline more time consuming activities such as order processing.

The Solution

NPL Solutions supplied a full site design that attracts customers, and has the capability to easily add new products as SII continues to grow. The design includes elements from the SII print catalog, as well as original graphic design, art direction by NPL Solutions.

The design gives the website a very professional, yet artistic look that attracts customers, enhances the credibility of SII as an online merchant, and accurately showcases the products which SII offers. The design:

• Generates interest in the products offered by SII
• Drives the visitors to certain pages/areas of the site
• Creates a safe and comfortable environment for the visitors

NPL Solutions also created a site structure which was loosely based off the catalog and quickly delivers all critical content to the visitor. The site structure:

• Supplies the most valuable information to the visitor in the fewest clicks (item view in 3 clicks)
• Encourages visitors to look into the further details of the products being offered
• Drive visitors to further action (e.g. purchase an item)

Finally, NPL Solutions optimized the site for easy accessibility to all search engines through the use of valid, semantic code, as well as search engine friendly URLs.

The Process

Because the site is based largely off the catalog which SII had developed, the content gathering phase went smoothly. Once the product categories were defined and the landing pages (e.g. home page, products page, etc.) were populated, the initial content phase was completed.

After the content gathering was complete, the project transitioned to the design phase. NPL Solutions presented SII with a set of design comps which, with a few slight modifications, became the finished version of the site. Below are the design comps which are compared to the final versions on the site

In the development phase, NPL Solutions created a powerful catalog application to dynamically display the products. We chose to use an XML database in order to maintain maximum portability. Also, using XML allows the same information to be parsed both locally as well as on the server (e.g. desktop and web-based catalog management systems), leaving room for different application development possibilities in the future.

The development phase also included an extensive modification to the osCommerce shopping cart/storefront system. This included both skinning the system, as well as the addition of several plug-ins and custom modules. This system integrated with both SII's current credit card processor as well as interfaced with their UPS shipping account.

The Results

While the sales figures of the site were not released, SII has granted access to some of their site usage statistics. The site launched in the middle of November, 2006. In the first three months of 2007, they saw over 500% growth in the number of unique visits. Their site has also managed to draw nearly 25 pages per visit, which averages out to approximately 15 specific item views per customer per visit.

NPL Solutions has also facilitated SII to be able to track how visitors reach their site. 32.08% of traffic to the site came from organic searches on search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Another 21.54% of all site traffic came from sites which link to www.steelimagesinc.com. The new site has also been recognized in blogs, as well as several metal art communities online, such as Innovational Iron.

* Data collected from January 1, 2007 to August 10, 2007.

What's Next

SII continues to develop original, high quality metal art, and takes advantage of the easy maintenance allowed by the custom catalog backend developed by NPL Solutions. They are also considering new features like a robust site-search, made possible by the flexibility of the XML database.