Plumbworld is the UK's largest independent online retailer of bathroom, plumbing and heating products, with annual sales approaching £12 million. Plumbworld was in the process of applying some updates to its website but was ultimately looking for a total redesign of the site. Webcredible carried out a comprehensive user-centered design project to ensure a redesigned site that was focused around the needs of the user.
This research and design process ensured that the redesigned site was fully focused around maximising online sales and conversions, optimised for search engines due to the highly efficient HTML structure and ordering, conformed to the highest accessibility standards, above and beyond AA-compliance and was print-friendly with quick loading times.
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Plumbworld sees huge conversion increases
Plumbworld is the UK's largest independent online retailer of bathroom, plumbing and heating products, with annual sales approaching £12 million.
Objectives
Having traded online since 1999, Plumbworld was in the process of applying some updates to its website but was ultimately looking for a total redesign of the site. The main objectives of the project were to:
- Increase sales by optimising conversion rates
- Improve the search engine optimisation of product and category pages
- Ensure the site offers the highest possible levels of accessibility
- Improve the site’s usability, calls-to-action and cross-selling
- Give the site a more professional look and feel
- Provide a print-friendly version of all pages
- Allow the site to operate on PDA's and mobile phones
What we did
We carried out a comprehensive user-centered design project to ensure a redesigned site that was focused around the needs of the user. This involved:
- Expert evaluation and competitor analysis to appraise the usability of the existing site and learn from competitors’ sites
- Wireframe design to show how the site’s pages should be laid out to maximise users’ ability to find and buy products
- Usability testing on the wireframes to evaluate and optimise their sales effectiveness
- Graphic design to apply graphical elements to the wireframes in order to give the site a more professional look and feel
- HTML coding to create the final web pages, making them fully accessible, XHTML/CSS compliant and optimised for search engines
This research and design process ensured that the redesigned site pages had the following characteristics:
- Fully focused around maximising online sales and conversions
- Optimised for search engines due to the highly efficient HTML structure and ordering
- Conformance to the highest accessibility standards, above and beyond AA-compliance
- Print-friendly so pages automatically fit on to A4 pages
- Lightening fast-loading pages due to the advanced CSS layout
- Fully cross-browser compatible
Results
Since the launch of the redesigned website, Plumbworld has seen significant gains in conversion rates. The new website now converts nearly 50% more visitors into customers and customer service issues related to site navigation have fallen by over 70%.
The usability lab was an eye opener for Plumbworld and watching real users attempting to locate products and place orders offered a valuable insight which had not previously been available.
“The results of Webcredible's work have been outstanding - our new site now converts 50% more visitors into customers and customer service issues have fallen by over 70%.”
- James Hickman, Managing Director, Plumbworld
