Websites are the last thing that most pallet companies regularly care about. And with most pallet companies being beyond busy, you probably don’t want to focus on this part of your business. But websites have become the digital equivalent of billboards. They shape the online image of your business. A well-designed website can go a long way in helping you market your business to customers, business partners and prospective employees.
So, if you want to redesign your website, where do you start? What does the process look like? What can you learn from others who have gone through this process? This two-part series will tackle those questions and more as the Enterprise interviews three people who have been involved with pallet industry website redesigns over the last few years. These pallet professionals share what they discovered. Their insights can help you no matter how extensive the upgrades you plan to explore.
What’s the Best Process? Start with the End in Mind.
Most people agree that you have to be strategic. Your vision and goals shape everything when it comes to a website redesign. Your audience will drive your goals and how you redesign your website.
Glenn Meeks, owner of Woodview Media-a website and online content developer, has worked with a number of pallet companies and organizations to re-design their websites and improve their online marketing strategy. He outlined, “The first thing to do is to sit down with the decision makers and ask, ‘What do you want your website to do for your company?’ Do you want it to provide leads, to recruit new workers, to sell e-commerce, or provide customer portal information?”
While you may want to tackle a bunch of things at once, Meeks cautions against this approach because it is difficult to achieve a diverse number of goals with a re-design. He suggested, “It is better to focus your website re-design goals on two or three primary objectives. Very often, those core primary goals will include the other items in their completion”
These goals act as the strategic guide during the rest of the process. Some companies develop audience profiles that describe the demographics of a target group, including their needs and wants. The profiles can also help identify keyword searches that a target group would use to find more information about a topic.
Audience profiles help inform goals and objectives and ensure that a redesign does what everyone hopes it will do. No matter the size of the company, the redesign process starts in the same place. You take a look at the current website as well as background data and identify ways to improve it based on the agreed upon top goals of the redesign.
Kamps Pallets conducted a major overhaul of its website in the summer of 2020. As a large recycler, the company had grown a lot since the website was created years ago.
Fuad Hasanovic, brand management specialist for Kamps Pallets, remembered, “We had a ton of goals. That shows you the condition that the website was in at the time. It was designed years ago. We came up with our main two goals. The first was to reflect the current state of the company and the brand. The second goal was to use the website as an educational tool for our key stakeholders. This focuses on customers, prospects and even employees to provide the kinds of information that they need to know.”
Sometimes companies will hire a person on staff to manage marketing and websites. Other times they will find a local webmaster, graphic designer or web design/marketing firm. When Hope Timber Pallet & Recycling in Newark, Ohio looked to recently redesign its website, the company turned to professionals. Tom Harvey, CEO of Hope Timber Pallet & Recycling, recalled, “Our old website was not the image that we wanted to project. So, we hired an advertising agency that does a lot of creative work, and they helped us out a lot.”
Hope Timber Pallet & Recycling’s new website came online in January of this year. Why select an outside agency? Harvey explained, “Our website was not showing up very strongly in Google searches. reviewed all of our SEO data, and they came up with great suggestions to improve our rankings and exposure online.”
Harvey agreed that coming up with your objectives is the first place to start. He said, “We wanted to bring our website up to date with the advancements of the company. We had added a robot dismantler, a new automated nailing line and upgraded truck fleet. Also, we wanted to improve our ranking and placement in online searches.”
Start Developing Guiding Principles and Documents
After developing mutually agreed upon goals based on the feedback from upper management, then you can start executing the plan. You will want to review any current brand guides and update those. Has the company name, logo or color scheme changed? Does it need to be refreshed to appeal to a different audience or appear more modern? What about the brand messaging? Has the company adopted any new geographic capabilities or new business segments? If the company does not have a brand guide. You may need to develop one. This would include the following: a description of the logo, slogan and key marketing taglines, color schemes and fonts for the brand, an outline of core messages to various audiences, and the objective of the marketing programs.
A brand guide certainly impacted the process at Kamps Pallets. Hasanovic said, “It’s always good to have a brand guide no matter the size of the company. It acts as your North Star when it comes to sales and marketing language, branding image, etc. How detailed you get depends on the company and its size. Starbucks, for example, covers in its guide how employees dress and the exact wording that should be used when interacting with customers.”
The brand guide and the objectives combine together to identify the key pages that need to be developed. Meeks commented, “Another important step is to develop a website map or ‘sitemap.’ A sitemap is a visual outline of all the pages and how they link to each other as well as the core focus of each page. This helps everyone identify the way various aspects of the proposed website connect to each other.”
There are numerous tools to identify and outline a current website’s sitemap as well as develop a new sitemap for the website re-design. Some popular ones include: XML-Sitemaps.com, Screaming Frog XML Sitemap Generator, Inspyder Sitemap Creator, Flowmapp and Yoast SEO (plugin) for WordPress websites. If you want to see previous versions of a website, another helpful tool is the Way Back Machine that keeps examples of website versions for millions of sites at http://web.archive.org/.
Once these first steps are completed, you can come up with a sample design idea to show the management and team members. It is important to communicate through the process so you don’t move forward with designs, pages and database projects that take up time and money and could get scrapped later due to miscommunication. In addition to mock examples of various concepts. You will also want to develop a budget and estimated timeline and a list of required content to finish the design.
Gathering Content
After settling on a preferred design, you need to go about gathering the content, pictures, video and other items needed to create the web pages. Some companies hire a professional photographer or videographer to capture images and video for both online and print marketing. If you were covered in trade or local media, such as the Pallet Enterprise, contact the publisher to see about getting access to use the stories or connect them to your website. Industrial Reporting Inc., the publisher of the Pallet Enterprise, encourages companies to link articles to their website. This usually includes the headline, article description and a link to the Enterprise database. See what we have written about your company by searching www.palletenterprise.com. The only time you would need to pay for use of Pallet Enterprise content is if you wanted to run the entire article on your website.
Typically, companies will need to develop the following content:
• Company logos in various colors, sizes and image formats
• Company key staff pictures, emails and biographies
• Description of products and services
• Pictures of products
• Pictures of company facility operations
• Company history and description
• Video explaining company products and services
• Keywords that you are optimizing the content for, think of phrases that customers would use to look for your company in a search engine.
• Content for pages on key topics, such as mold, pallet quality, sustainability, pallet recycling, ISPM-15 compliance, etc.
• Freebie content to give away to site visitors for contact information. Usually, this takes the form of a White Paper, checklist, diagram, graphic or other resource that involve pallets. Think of something that a pallet buyer would find handy.
Launching the Website Is Just the Beginning
Depending on your strategy, your website may be something that you update a few times per year or multiple times per month. Usually, a redesign is not the end of the content generation process. Tom Harvey of Hope Timber Pallet & Recycling pointed out that his company developed a blog and updates it regularly to keep content fresh on its website. His company also updates information to cover new staff recruiting pitches and product offerings.
Harvey said, “Fresh content helps your search engine ranking. I have been told people like to be able to read articles about your business, your industry, and what’s going on in the market. That information in turn increases your ranking on Google and other search engines.”
It’s true that your location in search engine rankings can be affected by your content as well as incoming links to you. At the end of the day, they’re not ranking for relevance as much as they’re ranking for content and looking for keywords.
To monitor progress, Hope Timber Pallet & Recycling holds a management meeting every month and website progress is discussed as well as ways to improve the website. For example, the company is aggressively using the website as a way to boost employee recruitment. Harvey recalled, “Like everyone else we are having real issues with labor. So, we went on a campaign to offer a $3,000 hiring bonus, and put that up as a banner on our website.”
Putting someone in charge of going through your website every few months is a great way to look for broken links or errors. You may not need to review every page. You can also set up monitoring services to identify website errors. If your website has a lot of errors, that alone can impact your search engine ranking.
Overall, it is a good idea to make your website a priority this year even though most pallet companies are easily able to find customers. Consider it an investment in your brand and your future.
