



SITUATION: Two Websites Needed to Be Combined into One International Resource
Power Climber had two outdated websites, for different regions and with multiple subdomains for different countries, that needed to be merged into one overarching website with a modern look and feel, including responsive design, to be compatible with both desktop browsers and mobile devices. Thoughtful content organization and systematization was necessary to create a seamless experience for the user and reduce future content management efforts for the site admin. Ultimately, the client also wanted to increase qualified traffic, lead generation and soft conversions.
SOLUTION: Strategic Recommendations to Meet Unique Requirements While Fitting Into a Brand Family
To achieve the client’s goals, Windmill brought together two outdated Power Climber websites using robust translation and regional content management tooling. The user is served regional content based on their region selection, and a careful redirect strategy ensures that users are funneled to the new, overarching website. Because the new Power Climber website is one of three new websites in the brand family, we followed the UX patterns and visual styles already established during the development of the Spider website. Content describing overlapping products among the three websites had to be carefully sorted out and tweaked to avoid duplicative content while ensuring that the product information was available to all relevant audiences.
The regional selector for the project presented an interesting use case, because some content needed to be segmented to display only to the North America audience or only to the global audience. We strategized the best ways to handle localization and regional content, and made technical recommendations on whether cookie-ing / IP address lookup should be enabled to assign a region upon first site visit. Ultimately, we recommended that the user should have full control over the region and language, with English as the default language and “global” as the default region upon first site visit. To give users greater control, we also recommended keeping this functionality separate from the translation, and avoided using an IP address lookup to determine an initial region selection. Once the user selected their region, specific types of content (i.e., mega menus, products, product categories and certain resources) would appear based on the region selected.
To manage translation, we set up the professional version of GTranslate, which permits manual translation of content and overrides/corrections to automated translations; we typically recommend this path, as free, automated translation is often inaccurate for highly technical subjects. A third party handles the translations for the website, inputting content into the framework that we provided.
Various tools and techniques used in this website redesign solution included:
- WordPress content management system with the native block editor serving as the primary tool for page and content creation
- Custom post types for products, resources, and case studies.
- GeoTargeting WP to create the regional content blocks and map those based on the geographic areas the client wanted to target.
- Gated resources section for approved customers using the Members plugin
- Folders Pro for media library and content organization
- Search & Filter Pro for more robust and custom site search tagging capabilities
Services Utilized
- Analytics and Insights
- Branding & Visual Design
- UX Consulting
- Web Design & Development
Project Information
Client:
Power Climber
Location:
365 Upland Drive Seattle, WA 98188
Date:
February 14, 2022
Website:
https://www.powerclimber.com/