Kent County Plumbing reached out to Grand Rapids Tech to have us design and develop a new website for them to improve the appearance and user experience (UX) that wasn't meeting their expectations on their existing site. The client wanted the new design to feel less "dark and heavy" with fewer total pages and less scrolling required to access important information.
Challenges
Restructuring the existing content — The client was happy with the existing content on their, but wanted it more focused and better organized. It was difficult to build out new pages with limited existing content without making large changes.
Transferring the domain name away from Wix and SquareSpace — The client's previous site was built on the Wix platform with SquareSpace for the domain registration. While we don't always require a client to transfer their domain name registrar and DNS hosting provider, in this case it was necessary.
Goals
- Improve the overall user experience (UX) to aid in capturing more leads from visitors to the site
- Implement visitor analytics to monitor the effectiveness of the new site
Data
We're still collecting analytics data on this site, but without previous metrics to compare against we won't have any meaningful data for some time. Be sure to check back for future updates.
Results and Outcomes
The client ended up with a new website and content management system (CMS) that was built using a modern headless approach so we aren't locked-in to a specific technology going into the future. Using Payload CMS for the CMS and Next.js for the front-end we're able to update the website content while still using static site generation over a global content delivery network (CDN).
New Tools
The new site also features some great external integrations like Google's reCAPTCHA v3 to protect form submissions from bots and spam. We've also integrated Microsoft Clarity for UX analytics so we can monitor the site visitors and make design changes as needed. Additionally we've implemented a proxy to the site using Cloudflare to help prevent malicious traffic before it even reaches the web server.
