Promat UK is a market leader in passive fire protection and high temperature insulation. They make products that go in some seriously cool projects, such as Heathrow Terminal 5, the London Underground and the engines of the Airbus A380, as well as more humble areas, such as the roof of electricity sub-stations.
Having done some work previously for them on their DURASTEEL website, the brief was to bring their main UK website up to date and into line with a new group style.
Promat UK is a subsidiary of Promat International and a market leader in passive fire protection and high temperature insulation, with products used in projects such as Heathrow Terminal 5, the London Underground and the engines of the Airbus A380.
We were called upon by Promat to redevelop their corporate website – http://www.promat.co.uk, which had been produced by another agency and neglected for some time. The site lacked a CMS, making it costly to update, and extensive use of Flash meant that it was unusable for some users and search engine unfriendly.
Before redesign
There were a number of constraints imposed by the client:
- The site had to follow the style and template of the parent company.
- The site had to use a proprietary ASP.NET CMS that their agency had used for a previous web project.
- There were large numbers of external links into the website from search engines and elsewhere that had to be mapped to pages in the new website.
The approach that we took was to:
- Audit the existing content to create maps of the old and new sites, and links from one to the other.
- Create a series of templates that subtly tweaked those supplied by the parent company, including a revised homepage, product listing pages and product details pages. Given the large volume of cross-links and documentation, we added Quicklinks and Downloads areas within the page.
- After producing a prototype for approval, we implemented the site using the CMS. This included the creation of a number of CMS modules.
- The site was tested and approved by ourselves and the client. The delivery phase of the project included creation of user-guides to the CMS and on-site training of staff from Promat’s Marketing Department.
After Redesign
The result was a site that Promat’s clients and prospects found much easier to use, staff found much easier to update and that achieved much higher organic search rankings.
