Masons Kings is a family-run business who sell some of the leading brands in Agricultural, Horticultural, Commercial, Golf and Garden machinery. They have over 40 years of experience as an agricultural machinery dealership and can provide professional and expert advice, products, and support.
The Goal
The client came to us wanting to upgrade their website to a better platform to make updating their website easier when it came to adding and changing products or pages. They also wanted a newer, fresher design to make them stand out from their competitors and to represent them better as a company.
Furthermore, the shop on the old site was bolted onto the main site, making the user experience overly complicated and unclear.
In addition to this, SEO was at the forefront of our mind during the design and build, so our Digital Marketing team were involved every step of the way as well.
What Did We Do?
After talking through the client’s specifications and plans for the website, we decided that it would be best to re-build their site completely in WordPress, where they would easily be able to edit the products on their site and the site’s pages and content in general.
We took their existing branding colours and incorporated them into a cleaner, clearer design – which was mapped out initially using our wireframing process – to ensure we maximized opportunities to signpost their customers to different sections of the site.
We upgraded the navigation to a mega max menu where their products are now listed clearly in their categories, making it easier for customers to browse the shop categories.
We also added a new careers section to the site using a Job Board plugin. This enables the client to add new career opportunities to the site and for them to be displayed cleanly and clearly. We also added in a new ‘meet the team’ section, containing their key departments and essential contact details.
An improvement from the old site was the blog section. On the original site, this was extremely hard to find – so we decided to link it directly from the top navigation and to include their three most recent posts at the bottom of the homepage, meaning that their customers can be kept up to date with upcoming events.
We also added a dynamic XML feed to the site that pulls through products from a Used Machinery platform Masons uses. The site runs this import every day and brings those products into the site, mapped to the correct category and containing the contact information pulled directly through to the site.
The website is also integrated with PayPal and Worldpay to take payments through the site.
Something you will see as soon as you land on the website is the header, this used to be a static image which didn’t catch your eye or really tell the story of Mason Kings. So, during the design process, we changed this to a short video header. This is much more appealing to visitors and can help to reduce the bounce rate, which, in turn, will benefit their marketing.
How Did Digital Marketing Play a Part?
The design and usability of the website were key to this project, but their future marketing efforts also played a huge role in every step of this process. Our Digital Marketing team worked on the SEO pre-launch to ensure the existing rankings were protected and the new site launched on the best foot.
This included elements like meta titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, image alt tags, URL structure, and keyword-rich content. Ranking protection was extremely important, so the site was looked over in-depth at every step.
It’s Time to Launch!
Mason Kings was a huge website to redesign and rebuild, we had to move over all of the products and content and improve all of these areas at the same time. This meant that when launch day arrived, both our team and the Mason Kings team couldn’t wait to get the new site live.
Our SEO team played a large role in the launch to ensure the website was seen correctly by Google, and we were protecting rankings wherever possible and even improving them straight away where we could.
You may think launching a website is quick and easy, but in this launch, we actually had over 1,000 different redirects to do. Overall, the launch was a huge success.
Mason Kings is happy with their new and improved site, and our team loved working with them every step of the way. If you’re interested to see their new site and have a little look around for yourself, head on over.
If you’re thinking about redesigning your website or wish to discuss any other functionalities on your website, contact us today, and we will be happy to help.