Towards a more goal-oriented digital business
We started cooperating with the international Kekkilä-BVB in the spring of 2019 with the aim of creating clarity between the different sites after Finnish Kekkilä and Dutch BVB merged together. The aim of the comprehensive renewal was to achieve a clear user experience and more cost-effective development. We worked to find a solution for the large number of sites that will be growing even more in the future.
From multiple inconsistent sites to a unified service
In the project’s first phase, we launched the new organization’s site, Kekkilä-bvb.com. We worked on a strategy to find out the purposes of the different sites and to identify user groups, so that the renewed domain structure would support search engine visibility in the best possible way. Kekkilä’s previous sites looked stylish, but the user experience and the site’s goals had fallen behind the visuals. The data collected from users was not utilized well enough, and users coming to the site could not be guided forward.
The biggest challenge was matching the different sites with Kekkilä’s new organizational structure and brand strategy. Of the seven fragmented sites, some had been implemented with a B2B and some with a B2C focus. The sites also ran different versions of the same codebase, which caused technical challenges. We wanted to form a cohesive site entity that could constantly be developed. The code base had to be consistent, and the development of the sites had to be realized in a way that improving one site would benefit the others as well. Of the different business units, we first decided to focus on the Retail & Landscaping websites.
The project began with an in-depth user survey aimed to identify user groups and their needs and modeling service paths. By comparing the existing sites with goal-directed service paths, we could easily recognize development needs and new service ideas.
Utilizing data for user-driven development
Each Kekkilä site has its own goals that can range from page views to product sales, contacting a person or finding certain information. In order to achieve these goals, it was essential to set reliable measurement for each site and constantly monitor visitor paths.
We defined goals for the site, user groups and channels, and worked on a report template in Google Data Studio to track user activity. The template allows administrators to monitor goal achievement and user activity in real time. Continuous testing of the site’s functionality has helped to develop the Kekkilä sites according to the users’ wishes.
In the past, Kekkilä’s sites served several different customer groups on different sites, and therefore the sites also competed with each other for search engine visibility. Thanks to a thorough domain strategy, even smaller domains now serve different user groups through a top-level navigation. We also invested in optimizing the site’s organic traffic, which ensures better search engine visibility for Kekkilä and helps potential customers find the content they were looking for.
A multisite site with an effective online shopping experience
In the second phase of the project, we renewed the retail and landscaping domains into a single multisite site using the WordPress content management system and our homegrown Everblox technology. The multisite ensures that users can log in to all sites from one place. Different language versions were implemented with the Polylang Pro plugin and forms with Salesforce.
We also developed a user interface library for Kekkilä with the purpose of reducing further development costs. Kekkilä-BVB can utilize the UI elements on all its pages, as their code base is uniform. We also developed a new online store for Kekkilä using WooCommerce.
We redesigned the Kekkilä Garden & Hasselfors Garden retail sites into a single multisite to make content management easy and efficient. The design is consistent regardless of the page, which makes further development more cost-effective.
Smooth content management
We wanted to give Kekkilä’s marketing the best possible tools for content production. The maintenance of the site had to be quick and effortless, which was achieved with the Everblox tool tailored to fit Kekkilä’s visual brand. Content producers can now easily create entirely new pages or modify the structure of existing pages. This makes the further development of the site very cost-effective compared to before.
The multisite makes it easy to manage multiple pages, as any module developed for one page can also be used on all the other pages. The UI library, on the other hand, ensures that Kekkilä’s professionals can build new sites by utilizing previously created wireframes. This significantly speeds up the development and design of the sites.
The project in a nutshell
Identifying user groups and their needs and modeling service paths
A domain strategy that allows smaller domains to serve different user groups
Organic traffic optimization and better search engine visibility
One multisite for the retail and landscaping sites
An efficient WooCommerce store
A user interface library that allows building new sites by utilizing previously created wireframes
