Web Design and Development
By Professionals · For Professionals

Case Study: North Bend Originals

Web Design, Web Development, SEO, Content Editing, Web Hosting

North Bend Originals is a family owned and operated kettle corn machine and accessory manufacturer/supplier, located in Salem, Ohio. Brad and Andrea Schuler, the owners of North Bend Originals, have been manufacturing kettle corn equipment since the early 2000s, and have a reputation for making some of the finest equipment in the industry. They have customers all over the United States and Canada, and supply kettle corn equipment to customers as far away as Australia.

NorthBendOriginals.com

Our Mission

When Equentity LLC reengineered the previous version of NorthBendOriginals.com back in 2004, our goal was to take a site originally created out of a FrontPage template and construct it to be more search engine friendly and present itself more consistently to visitors. Our results were impressive, with great improvements in search engine traffic and notable increase in visitor-to-customer conversion.

Three years later, everyone felt it was time to take the Web site to the next level. The North Bend Originals line of merchandise was growing, more information was being made available, and we all agreed an update to the look and feel was due. We made it a priority to ensure we preserved the search engine success the Schulers were already enjoying. Little did we suspect we were going have significant positive impact on their visitor numbers as well!

Preproduction

Most of our preparation had been done years earlier, and already put to use once successfully. Equentity LLC has always had a great relationship with the Schulers and North Bend, and we spent much more time talking about specific goals for building on our current successes, rather than learning about the client.

The better portion of our mission involved updating the look and feel of the site. The challenge here was that people seemed to really like the style of the old site, and we were tasked with preserving that style, yet still giving it enough of a modern flair that the site felt and acted like someone had put special care into creating it. We needed to keep it rustic, preserve the wood grain accents, use a lot of earthy colors, greens and browns, yet make the popcorn business look exciting, a challenge indeed!

After running through a number of layout ideas, we molded a layout that fit the criteria, that the client really liked. The most important thing when designing a site's layout is that visitors react to it in a positive way, both through direct feedback and action (action = becoming customers). In the end, the people with purchasing power are the most important audience for a site like this. We would see whether the new layout was effective soon enough.

Production

Producing the new site was considerably easier than many sites we've done, both because of our familiarity with the customer and the availability of content in mostly complete form. This time, we created a much more comprehensive system of file includes to facilitate easier maintenance and future site expansion. We constructed a leaner, more semantically valid structure from a code perspective, molding the markup to fit the content optimally.

During production, we were careful to preserve file names and folder structure. We didn't want the site to drop in search engine rankings even for a short period of time while search engines caught up with a new structure. This turned out to be a very good strategy for the site.

Postproduction

When the dust settled and the new site was launched, we stepped back for a month, quietly monitored the site and took inventory of our efforts. Here's what we found. Comparing the first full post-launch month with the same month the previous year:

1. Unique visitors were up 170%.
2. Total visitors were up 159%.
3. Total page views were up 143%.
4. Bandwith comsumption was up 133% - when your bandwidth increase is substantially less than your traffic increase, this typically means you've achieved greater engineering efficiency.
5. Search engine referrals were up 124%.

This is very good news for any site that undergoes a major reengineering. But the real test came a couple months later, and the results were even more compelling:

1. Unique visitors were up 237%.
2. Total visitors were up 208%.
3. Total page views were up 172%.
4. Search engine referrals were up 157%.
5. Catalog and other sales inquiries increased almost 200%!

Our primary focus from the start was update the look and feel of the site a bit, a departure from our normal business improvement objectives. If we had achieved only this to the client's satisfaction, we would have completed a reasonably successful project. Instead, we improved their already healthy online business significantly, and they could not be happier with the results (see testimonial below).

Testimonial