Case study: Schwarzschild Ochs
A user-friendly, SEO-optimised, classic yet stylish website on Umbraco CMS.
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How do you present a company with roots dating back 242 years? London based Textile Wholesalers Schwarzschild Ochs Ltd. wanted a new more contemporary website that would better comply with online demands anno 2009 but they also wanted the look and feel to reflect the company's long history dating back to 1767. They wanted a trustworthy website that made it easy for visitors to find what they were after. Codehouse took on the challenge and brought Schwarzschild Ochs Ltd. into the 21st Century with a brand new classic web-presence.
The solution was a new, user-friendly, SEO-optimised, classic yet stylish, and fully content managed website offering all the functionality and features sought by the company's website visitors. The new website is designed and built by Codehouse using the open source Umbraco CMS.
The new design brings the company's long history dating back to 1767 into a contemporary context by mixing classic elements with a more modern look and feel.
Umbraco CMS: The perfect management tool
Thanks to Umbraco CMS the web editors at Schwarzschild Ochs Ltd. are able to manage the online stock lists entirely from the content management system. The redesigned site structure in combination with the Umbraco CMS enables the web authors to manage the large amount of content and media elements without further technical assistance.
Umbraco CMS is a feature-rich professional content management system fully capable of competing with other CMS solutions, the only difference is that Umbraco CMS is open source. During the last couple of years a rapidly increasing community of dedicated developers has emerged around Umbraco CMS which means that the speed of development of enhanced functionality is going really fast. The entire community of developers constantly sharing ideas and prototypes which has lead to a large number of add-on packages (modules) and the number is still growing.
A findable website
The switch to a new website was part of Schwarzschild Ochs Ltd. strategic move towards increasing online business. Therefore it was imperative that the new website would be found by the potential clients when they searched the web for a textile wholesaler or a particular fabric. Codehouse built the website to be search engine-friendly (SEO-optimised) with the correct use of metadata (such as h1, h2 and h3 tags), descriptive URL's and an XML sitemap. These features enable the website not only to be read by human beings but also to be crawled, appreciated and indexed by the search engine algorithms.
A powerful search engine
The website's main purpose is to display the company's large portfolio of different fabrics and enable visitors easily to find materials of interest and then make an enquiry online or locate agents in their part of the world. With an extensive portfolio of fabrics with many different attributes finding a user-friendly navigation and search methodology turned out to be a bit of a challenge. But Codehouse took on the challenge and developed a customised search engine with multiple keywords capabilities that makes it easy and intuitive to browse collections and find related fabrics, plus it allows for both discounted and new lines to be promoted.
After the introduction of their new website Schwarzschild Ochs Ltd. has seen a remarkable increase in online traffic and enquiries.
If you would like to learn more about how Codehouse can help grow your business online then feel free to get in touch.
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