February 2009
Penn State Industries, who retails woodturning and dust collection supplies, is a long-time NetBlazon client, having first come to us for minor development services in 2002. In late 2007, we began working with them, in conjunction with designer Susan Ruff, on a redesign and re-platform project. Penn State Industries' goals were to better connect with their dedicated existing customer base, who like to share ideas and learn new techniques for their craft; to better merchandise their goods with personalized product recommendations; and to offer a clear and easy way to find products through navigation and on-site search tools.
While the designer and in-house staff were working on the initial design concepts, NetBlazon performed a migration assessment, which included an analysis of the existing Miva Merchant 4-based website and the add-on modules used by the shopping cart. We then combined the results with their requirements for the new sites, and provided Penn State Industries with a comprehensive plan for a build-out of their new store on Miva Merchant 5.5.
The new site offers many of the same features that were available on the previous store, such as customer reviews, volume pricing, and customer wishlists. However, the site was reformatted to better display this information, and additional content was added to improve the customer's ability to select the right product, through the use of Miva Merchant's custom product fields.
We paid close attention to on-site search engine optimization during the build-out phase. The store uses our Smart Links for SEO module to create search engine-friendly links to product and category pages. We developed the various category templates to include keyword-friendly copy for the search engines, and the user-generated content from the customer reviews is included on the main product page for an additional content boost.
Penn State Industries made the decision to move two of their important site features into outside, hosted solutions. Their product search tool is provided by SearchSpring, which also handles the filtering dropdowns on select category pages. Personalization product recommendations are provided by MyBuys.
Since the new website went live, Penn State Industries has seen their conversions rates increase by approximately 2%. Various metrics continue to see growth as new features are added and the site is tweaked based on testing.
