Website Redesign Breaks New Ground for a Foundation of Business Success

Blue Diamond Attachments (BDA) knows the importance of a solid digital presence. The nimble and well-known manufacturer produces high-quality attachments for skid steers, excavators, tractors, and other heavy equipment through independent dealers across the United States.

The company’s former website, built on WordPress, needed to provide better support for its dealers while remaining highly usable and accessible for end-users of their products.

Achieving these goals would require launching a high-performance website that offered a superior user experience and refreshed messaging, all working together to support the company’s ambitions for growth.

Here’s a look at the BDA website redesign project’s goals and challenges, and how our process worked to deliver a new website that positions the Blue Diamond brand for the future.

Design and Messaging to Elevate the Brand

Bottom Line Up Front Content

From day one, Blue Diamond emphasized the importance of compelling brand messaging and authentic communication as the cornerstone of the digital strategy. By identifying key themes and establishing a consistent voice, BDA aimed to resonate with its target audience and foster meaningful connections.

Blue Diamond’s voice and messaging had to reflect their deeply held values and commitment to their customers. Through stakeholder interviews and collaborative discussions, the messaging approach centered on being confidently humble.

We focused on supporting the brand’s unique value proposition: Enduring Partnerships. Uncompromising Equipment. Exceptional Service.

DBS produced a brand manifesto to capture the aspirations of the Blue Diamond brand. With section headlines like Transforming Challenges into Triumphs, Delivering Greatness Every Day, Living and Breathing the Brand, and Unyielding and Unrivaled, we were equipped to drive those themes that brought the brand life and, by extension, the attachments.

Brand messaging stands equal with website design and development best practices.

Humanizing an industrial brand reflects the people behind the scenes. This messaging influences initial impressions and offers consistency throughout the site. It also builds emotional connections and differentiates them in a competitive market, leading to increased conversions and long-term brand value.

Bold Design, Clear Impact

The Blue Diamond website prioritizes concise, bold headlines, brief text, and straightforward imagery to spotlight its attachments. Drawing from Blue Diamond’s established brand expressions, our design approach emphasized utility without compromising aesthetics.

Throughout the project, Blue Diamond’s input shaped the development of mockups, ensuring coherence and reinforcing brand identity while enhancing user experience. The style guides offer valuable guidance for content administrators managing the site moving forward.

Incorporating headlines featuring a “bottom-line-up-front” approach allows Blue Diamond’s team to deliver introductions to information effectively, ensuring that users can digest information without feeling overwhelmed.

Salesforce provides the data for locating a dealer.

The new website leverages valuable Salesforce. External Link. Opens in new window. information to create an optimal user experience for users to search for dealers by city, state, or ZIP code, ensuring they quickly find what they need. This information integrates with Google Maps display locations.

To ensure a smooth browsing experience, we provided a dealer list that updates in real-time as users search. The integration focused on leveraging Salesforce information to deliver timely updates, streamlined data management, and an intuitive interface, ultimately creating an optimal experience for our users.

Two other integrations support the e-commerce parts store. Blue Diamond’s Infor SyteLine ERP. External Link. Opens in new window. maintains up-to-date information about inventory, orders, and financials through a secure API key. This involved developing a custom plugin to handle requests for relevant data. The Craft platform assures data protection with secure login storage. Users would know immediately if the part needed was available.

The final integration combined the company’s 3G Pacejet Shipping. External Link. Opens in new window. platform and the Craft application. The API for this service calculates shipping rates and tracks shipments, providing users with real-time shipping quotes during checkout and enhancing their shopping experience.

A major consideration throughout the implementation of these services was ensuring they enhanced the website’s functionality without compromising speed and performance, thereby maintaining optimal technical SEO. External Link. Opens in new window. standards.

In the end, the integrations contribute to the goal of creating a great user experience.

Project Overview

Having outgrown its existing website, Blue Diamond needed a comprehensive platform capable of sustaining and accelerating its growth trajectory. Plans called for redeveloping the main website, in addition to updating its e-commerce platform and dealer portal.

The imperative was clear: Design and build a high-performance website equipped to handle an expanded product line, increased content, and a growing visitor base that needed access to a variety of company and product information. The project boiled down to a few key objectives:

• Refresh core site branding
• Emphasize user experience and intuitive UI design
• Enhance organic search with schema markup and technical SEO
• Create a better e-commerce experience for parts sales
• Update and customize the dealer portal
• Produce landing page messaging and content that reflected the brand’s core values

Challenges Addressed Up Front

For Blue Diamond Attachments’ website project, the DBS team identified several challenges, including content organization, search engine optimization, brand messaging integration, software connection, and user experience enhancement.

Identifying these manageable hurdles at the outset helped set stakeholder expectations, ensuring satisfaction with the final product by setting realistic timelines and goals.

These challenges required careful consideration because of their complexity. Each challenge had a ripple effect on the others, so it was important to understand how they could be approached holistically.

The savvy digital team at Blue Diamond already had a strong SEO foundation – which was unusual in our experience, as we’ve often seen companies like BDA that skew their websites towards impressive design and imagery rather than best practices such as performance and site architecture.

The biggest challenge was maintaining a cohesive product matrix, properly mapping and maintaining the careful structure Blue Diamond designed. We ensured consistency and clarity in navigation, accommodating a diverse range of products.

Implementing a robust technical SEO and schema structure strategy for the parts store was crucial for enhancing visibility and search engine rankings. Balancing technical optimization requirements with user experience, considerations posed a challenge in optimizing site architecture and content structure effectively.

Weaving brand messaging seamlessly throughout the website to elevate Blue Diamond Attachments’ unique value proposition presented a creative challenge. Messaging had to be consistent in voice and tone across various pages while aligning with the design.

Incorporating the online parts store with ERP integration for revised quotes, along with incorporating the Pacejet API for rate quoting, posed significant challenges to ensuring data flow between systems and functionality for a successful e-commerce application. Additionally, integrating the custom dealer portal with existing systems while maintaining data security and privacy demanded thorough testing and implementation of robust security measures.

Improving the user experience (UX) of the website required special consideration, given the different audiences and industries using the attachments for skid steers, mini skid steers, excavators, forklifts, and tractors. The versatility of the attachments meant that many could be used with different equipment types.

The DBS and Blue Diamond teams didn’t shy away from acknowledging these challenges early in the strategic planning. Transparency helped mitigate risks, plan resources, manage expectations, and position future decisions.

The challenges didn’t exist in silos. Content mapping and technical SEO overlapped with UX. And development solutions had to factor in their impact on the user experience.

The Blue Diamond knew the strengths of their existing WordPress platform. And they were aware that it could not offer the horsepower needed to achieve their goals. They needed to be comfortable changing platforms, because WordPress had become a familiar work environment for their internal users.

The Craft CMS presented numerous advantages over WordPress, including a more scalable database structure, superior client segmentation and customization options, faster performance, built-in content staging, reduced reliance on plugins, native support for decoupling, and integrated e-commerce.

Beyond presenting the technical advantages of Craft over WordPress, DBS created a Craft test environment to explore the platform’s publishing features and functions. This helped them experience first hand the content-production advantages.

 

Strategic Vision and Goals

At the project’s core lay a meticulous strategy to gain insights into Blue Diamond’s products, business model, and core values. The team developed a comprehensive understanding of Blue Diamond’s aspirations through intensive discovery and planning sessions, setting the stage for a strategic new design and messaging that would resonate with dealers and end-users.

• Deepening Our Understanding: Strategy sessions facilitated a comprehensive understanding of Blue Diamond’s products, business model, and values.
• Enhancing the User Experience: The primary goal was to provide a superior online experience, emphasizing intuitive site navigation and authentic brand communication.
• Planning Custom Integrations: Seamless provision of necessary information for dealers and end-users was prioritized, including features like the Dealer Locator and Parts searching and ordering.

Our Approach to Navigation – Minimizing Choice Overload

The navigation design focused on simplifying choices into intuitive pathways in the face of many attachments and application choices for different equipment types. Decisions focused on two primary goals.

Prioritizing Key Sections: The navigation needed to meet various user needs and industry demands, ensuring an intuitive experience to help dealers and end users find relevant information and resources.

Reducing Choice Overload: The navigation needed to guide users to menus that would not overwhelm them amidst the multitude of options available.

 

Considerations

A navigation link for “Attachments” was an obvious priority and was positioned first. What we felt was missing from Blue Diamond’s original site was a destination where users could explore all the things they could accomplish with attachments – in other words, what type of work could be performed. So we created an “Applications” section that organized the various attachments that could be used for jobs commonly involving heavy equipment such as landscaping, construction, material handling, and farming. These two sections fulfilled most of the needs of all audiences.

Finally, the rest of the navigation addressed other primary requirements outlined in user stories: the need for parts, support, company background, contacting Blue Diamond, and finding a dealer.

Submenus under Attachments would offer quick choices for narrowing attachments based on equipment types, helping users quickly display attachment options for skid steers, excavators, forklifts, tractors, and mini-skid steers.

 

Dealer Portal Section

Creating the dealer portal involved many of the strategy steps for Blue Diamond’s public-facing website.

While the design mirrored the main website, achieving an optimal user experience for the dealer portal involved defining the unique user experience and user stories.

This information contributed to new wireframes and mockups.

Docusign. External Link. Opens in new window. integration was added to facilitate secure online business transactions.

 

Integrated E-commerce

Unlike WordPress, which requires third-party e-commerce solutions, Craft offers an integrated solution. Avoiding a plugin solution helped convince Blue Diamond to build their new site with Craft CMS and the associated Craft Commerce. External Link. Opens in new window., which provides developers with a powerful toolkit for building online stores with more flexibility. The system’s logical structure simplifies development, ensuring that code aligns with business needs and granular customization.

For site managers, Craft Commerce simplifies content management, product updates, and order processing. Shared domains and user accounts offer a cohesive experience across Blue Diamond’s main site and e-commerce section.

 

Tying it All Together

Beyond design and messaging, development focused on optimizing code and functions to deliver high performance based on best practices.

Craft’s lightweight core, efficient database queries, and limited reliance on third-party plugins contribute to fast page load times, which positively impacts SEO rankings. Finally, schema markup works behind the scenes to support strategic, keyword-focused content.

See the comparison of Craft and WordPress below.

 

More than a Website, It’s a Heavy-Duty Business Tool

The successful execution of the Blue Diamond project showcased how meticulous planning and strategic execution build the foundation for successful SEO based on rigorous development.

Through orchestrating Craft’s e-commerce capabilities and adding a dealer portal, DBS ensured an unparalleled user experience for the various audiences on day one.

The careful consideration of technical SEO standards throughout development underscored the commitment to delivering a high-quality, high-performance B2B website.

Let’s discuss opportunities for enhancing your B2B website to offer users an optimal experience and elevate search rankings.

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