With over 30 years of designing and supplying luxury bathrooms, Walton Bathrooms specialise in contemporary bathrooms from the highest quality European brands.
They remain at the forefront and are a highly-respected company within the bathroom industry both in the UK and abroad.
Their website had great SEO (often ranking on search engines ahead of the brand websites themselves!), but it had a dated design and functionality and no online payment process. A key element of the brief revolved around Walton Bathrooms' existing SEO. It was crucial not to lose this with the new website. We needed to find a solution that would maintain the current standard but could also be improved upon with the latest industry best practice standards.
With an abundance of online competitors selling the same luxury product ranges, Walton Bathrooms knew that they needed to improve their online presence in order to stay at the forefront of their industry from a digital perspective. The website user experience needed to be improved, the design updated and made responsive and an online purchasing process introduced in order to allow users to buy 24hrs a day via their desktops, tablets and mobiles.
What we did
Working with the Walton Bathrooms team, we held a number of discovery and planning workshops in order to identify the key requirements of the new website.
Between both teams, we carried out extensive consumer and competitor research in order to define the most effective website structure, particularly the structure of the navigation and products. One result of this structural planning was a significant change from the existing site, the introduction of an ‘Our Products’ section, which we knew was the way in which consumers like to browse for products.
The second element which took extensive research and planning was the e-commerce process. Detailed wireframes were created to map out the purchasing process, taking into consideration customer account creation and product variations and options in order to ensure it worked seamlessly across devices.
Time saving site management
Walton Bathrooms had over 8000 products and product variants on their existing website and asked Syndicut to to create a custom import process in order to pull these into the new website content management system (CMS) and reduce the administration time of adding products to the new CMS.
Prior to the site refresh, the Walton Bathrooms team had to input new products and update existing product information manually. To save them time for future changes we created an import platform so prices and details can be checked and updated through the upload of a CSV file, which removes the need to do this manually on a product-by-product basis.
Referring to the wireframes we had created during the discovery and planning phases of the project, we knew it was crucial to keep the basket and payment process for Walton Bathrooms as simple as possible. Users needed an easy and secure way to pay through the site. The website integrated with the Barclaycard API in order to process payments using the bespoke online forms we built on the website. 3D Secure was also implemented as an additional security measure to protect against fraudulent transactions. The functionality to allow users to create accounts on the website assists repeat customers when coming back to make a repeat order.
We rebuilt and refreshed Walton Bathroom’s existing ‘My Bathroom’ functionality which gives a customer the option to add products they're interested in onto a wishlist when logged into their account. When the customer views the “My Bathroom” page, they will see a list of the products they have selected and either submit these for a quote or move to their online basket to process their order.
SEO
Knowing that SEO was a crucial element of the brief and needed to be retained at all costs, we implemented a number of SEO best practices In order to both maintain and improve the existing SEO. These best practices included the implementation of intelligent URL structures, individual product pages (which hadn’t been a feature of the previous website) and structured data to display products in search engine shopping results.
