The new QubicaAMF site is online: from ideas to “go live”
QubicaAMF Worldwide is the global leader in bowling products, with sales offices all over the world.
Their products include scoring systems, bowling centre management software, lanes, maintenance products, bowling pins, furniture as well as the world’s first and only Bowler Entertainment System.
A business-centered company needs to rely on an effective online communication strategy, up to the objectives of the largest and most respected manufacturer and marketer of bowling and mini bowling products.
In that respect, it was then clear that the previous website, a little too “old”, needed intervention.
The redesign phase
On the other hand, a simple revamping could not suffice: a complete redesign of the web portal was required.
Federica Gozza, marketing manager at QubicaAMF, immediately pointed out the key points of the redesign: improved ease of update, improve navigation for the various personas, improve the SEO, improve clarity and effectiveness of the “call to action”, revise the landing page management logics, implement mobile support, provide a system to manage the Bowling World Cup (an event that QubicaAMF has organized since 1965, with the highest number of participant countries).
Such a challenge was definitely more than ordinary!
One key objective of the new website is conveying the idea that QubicaAMF is capable to suggest solutions, that are innovative, unique in their field, reliable and are an excellent investment in the entertainment business.
The business focus of QubicaAMF, considering its typical customers and products, is B2B, and the site must strongly keep it into consideration.
To meet the challenge, we couldn’t restrict ourselves to the old “Let’s set up a standard portal with a little bit of graphics!”, a typical tactics when a job has to be done well but quickly, without any frills.
In order to play at high levels, all the team members had to be top-notch players: the QubicaAMF team itself was composed by people from both IT and communications & marketing departments.
Consequently, also RedTurtle needed to build a team highly skilled and experienced professionals in several disciplines: UX design, web marketing/SEO, web solutions development.
To that purpose, we involved our most reliable and successful partners: NiEW for UX design and GT Idea for SEO/web marketing.
The first part of the project consisted in getting to know the domain, the business and the service model, identifying the target audiences and the relevant personas for each service delivered by the new portal.
Three personas were identified:
- Those who want to invest in bowling
- Those who have to modernize their bowling centre or their place/structure for entertaimnment
- Those who wish to improve the management of their bowling centre
In order to fully understand the current contents and partly reuse them as the basis of the next design phase, it was then necessary to map the existing contents and evaluate them from the communication point of view.
The scope of the competitive analysis was broadened beyond the borders of the site of QubicaAMF, including the main competitors in this evaluation process.
The next step was aimed at delivering the first surfable wireframes, allowing users belonging in the different personas to carry out navigation tests on the website. The wireframe-based tests led us to the first graphic proposals, that were subsequently revisited.
The making of the site
After this first part of the project, which strongly involved the marketing management, both in Italy and the USA, we got to the system implementation phase.
Naturally we chose our favorite CMS, Plone, on this occasion in its renewed version 5.
But a simple “assembly” of CMS contents couldn’t suffice: the development of special editorial tools was required, to allow the marketing dept. of QubicaAMF to act independently on the different areas of the site: from the home page to the handling of products, from the investors to the testimonials, from the local offices to the handling of the contacts.
One of the system requirements was easy handling by editorial staff, with features to allowing the recombining of contents, images in particular, in different sections of the site.
Another challenge to meet was finding the best way to manage the information, in particular people contacts, about the local offices and about the distributors of the branches all over the world, supporting the customers in 90 countries: those data are fundamental for back-office effectiveness, as when sending the e-mail to the person of the right profile and the reference country.
In addition, the system had to grant easiness of the update and data consistency.
During the implementation of the system, we used a sort of an incremental development with continuous partial releases, allowing to the editorial staff to gradually extend their work to the various sections of the site as soon as each section was provided.
This kind of approach proved very effective and allowed the editorial staff, with the support of Ricreativi, the graphic agency, to work on the new material, both photos and videos, in parallel with our job.
Lots of contents were created from scratch or with post production work , especially the videos: one of the objectives of the project was to show real people, real customers, often friends of QubicaAMF.
While the editorial staff was working on the contents the work on the SEO part started as well: in order to be ready at the moment of online launch, we analyzed via Google Analytics the accesses to the previous website, to prepare the redirects needed for the domain switch: this is a fundamental step when you update a site so deeply (changing the URLs of the contents ) not to loose traffic nor the acquired SERP standing.
With this in mind, also the HTML code was optimized, using the schema.org markup, in order to maximize the SEO efficiency.
The contents were prepared or reviewed putting a particular care in the definition of the titles and of the URLs.
Next steps
After the launch of the new website we are now focussing on the metrics to monitor the improvements and to study any possible “tuning” of the SEO strategy.
We are also studying a way to bring the landing pages on the same platform, that shall integrate with the marketing tools and the CRM system.
In addition, another step will be the remake of the customer portal, where also technical material will be available. The new customer portal will support the new system of integrated customer management implemented by the e-commerce system.
In the end… we never get bored… and in this week the 52nd edition of the Bowling World Cup is going on, with the the scores available in real time: but I’ll tell you about that in my next post…
