Dycem: Simplifying Sites, Without Compromising on Visitor Experience
The Client
If you haven’t heard of Dycem, let us introduce you: this British company is a world leader in contamination control. They’re known for their innovative floor mats which trap dirt from shoes and wheels, prevent particle growth, and stop germs and bacteria from entering sanitised environments. They work with food companies, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, and more. Dycem have been in operation for more than 50 years, and as you can probably imagine, they’ve built up a huge client base – and a large product inventory – during this time.
The Challenge
Websites: at the end of the day, they’re such simple things, aren’t they? They’re just digital assets that help you connect with audiences in the online world. But let’s be honest. For lots of businesses out there, managing and maintaining these digital assets can be messy at times.
Dycem was one of those businesses. Trying to please everyone, the company ended up with 13 separate websites in total, all serving similar purposes. 13 sites? Yes, really! With clients all over the world in various different industries, and interested in different products, Dycem had built a variety of websites to meet a range of needs and requirements. While this approach had worked well initially, the sites were starting to get old. It was becoming tedious to manage them all, and they were succumbing to a multitude of errors.
Perhaps even more worryingly, they were in a bit of an SEO pickle. Six of the sites were essentially carbon copies of each other, each in a different language. And with Google expanding its ranking factors, these sites were now competing against each other for SERPs visibility.
The Dycem team came to us here at Soto. They wanted to amalgamate all the sites (except non-slip mats, which was to remain a separate entity) into one, using a fresh, modern theme. We’ve worked with Dycem for several years, so we knew their business well and spent a long time discussing the best approach. We needed to figure out how to merge the sites in a way that would enable us to keep everything simple for users, while still distinguishing between key areas of business.
How We Helped
Wanting a fresh look, Dycem were working with a design team who were able to provide us with the layouts for 40 of the key pages. This was a massive help, as we knew exactly what Dycem wanted, and we were able to develop templates that would allow us to make these layouts a reality. Within each template, we split the designs into modules, built one of each, refined them, and optimised them before using them across the site.
With the modules all sorted, we were able to hand these over to Dycem so that they had what they needed to build new pages in the future; allowing their site to grow with the business.
There was just one thing left to address: the language barrier. We knew we couldn’t move forward with six versions of the site, all in different languages. So instead we used the WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML). This allowed us to build just one website that would display the relevant language for the region, completely eliminating the previous SEO issue.
This was one of our biggest projects here at Soto, and as it was important to get it right, rather than do it fast, it was probably one of our lengthiest. Despite the challenges, Dycem found that their leads shot through the roof with the new site, and saw a major boost in SEO, too.
