The situation
Floor Coverings International (FCI), a notable in-home designer flooring brand, already had a strong reputation for quality and an established brand when they began looking for a web partner. However, because that brand and level of service were not reflected fully online, they needed to engage a team that could help showcase it better to increase local franchisee sales and the client experience.
FCI chose Imarc because:
- We could provide scalable solutions for their growing brand.
- We were willing to partner with multiple agencies to achieve a larger goal.
- Our team had vast experience in flexible CMS builds that could benefit their corporate marketing team.
- We could deliver an enhanced, frictionless franchisee experience without compromising their larger brand.
The challenge
Before Imarc redesigned FCI’s website, they didn’t have a concrete brand identity online despite having already rebranded offline and in their paid media. Because of this, the web experience was very similar to competitor brands. That brand weakness and a lackluster user journey experience made it much harder to earn the volume of quality leads franchisees needed to succeed.
Finally, though it wasn’t obvious to the end-user, the usability of the previous CMS was a hurdle for the corporate marketing team, making updates complicated. Frustration was present from front to back.
The solution
Project management
While we employ strong communication for every project, this one required another level of service and synchronization. A total of three agencies were involved in this redesign, plus the client, an ever-growing corporation with numerous corporate and franchise stakeholders.
Imarc architected the website’s look, feel, and messaging and our two partners, Location3 and Response Labs took on the hyperlocal search engine optimization and premium user content needs. Before we began the project, all teammates worked together to create a system for approvals at the agency level up to the client.
Strategy
As FCI exists in a highly competitive space, our Strategy phase was more important than ever.
We started by studying the homepage messaging, structure, and visuals of competitors of different sizes and reach to document how they're speaking to similar audiences. In addition, we reviewed other in-home services outside of the flooring industry to understand how they balanced corporate and local messaging.
Once we had an idea of how users were experiencing other comparable sites, we conducted corporate and franchisee stakeholder interviews to understand a cross-section of perspectives, needs, and pain points that the new FCI website should solve for.
We then created four personas with different motivations, desires, and purchase triggers. These were initially based on previously discovered disclosed customer segments based on motivational mindsets - “get it done” and ”get it done right.” Those customer segments were then evolved to include other findings from Imarc’s research. Together, these personas allowed us to craft tailored experiences. It also allowed us to map out customer journeys that illuminated which pages were most important to each persona so that we could surface those key pages as quickly and easily as possible.
FCI needed to align with their customer’s needs in different places – at the corporate and local levels. Understanding their customers' needs and motivations at different stages helped us to strategize content and pathways for the new website.
Andrew Daley
A series of design principles were crafted to help keep our teams aligned and centered around the strategy work. The team used this as the foundation for architecting the site structure, defining the navigation system, and wireframing new pages.
One of the major focuses was the content gap at the top of the funnel. The website provided little value to prospective customers who were early in their journey and not ready to commit to a consultation. Adding an ideas gallery and a resource library offers ways to build excitement and understanding before engaging with the local FCI team.
A lack of consistency between franchisees' content and experience negatively impacted the brand. Standardizing the product offerings, language used, layouts, and calls to action across all franchisees helped create unity and alignment.
Creating a clear distinction between the corporate and local franchisee sites helped set up a conversion strategy that directed prospective customers to their local team. Prospects are given several options to engage, housed in a consistent global contact bar.
A notable element of the conversion strategy was the use of sticky navigation which was crucial in helping users find their local team, easily, no matter where they were on the site.
Another area we paid specific attention to was how the website would behave on mobile. Many of FCI’s users shop on their mobile devices, so it was key to plan that out at all levels.
Our goal was to provide useful information and reassurance at all stages of a prospective customer journey, and help guide them to the next stage of the process anywhere in the site.
Mike Flannery
FCI already had done brand work and created a messaging-forward style guide, but this website project allowed us to take their vision and direct the messaging directly to their end users to help them find the flooring they would love. We did this by pairing it with expert visual design.
After exploring the brand with key stakeholders at a creative kickoff, we learned that FCI wanted a digital experience that was relatable, accessible, and robust. To achieve these goals, we used fresh, lifestyle photography, unique line-art iconography, and a streamlined user interface to help the customer navigate through the site with ease.
The design compositions began with two versions of the homepage. One representing the corporate brand and another for franchisee owners. The corporate homepage tells the brand story and allows customers to engage and learn about a wide range of flooring products. The franchisee site focuses on personalizing the brand on a local level.
In addition to the two homepage designs, Imarc created eight additional internal pages that integrated full-color photography with premium content and tools for users. Ultimately, the updated visuals helped guide the users in making an informed flooring decision.
Floor Coverings International came to Imarc with an established brand searching for a distinctive web experience that would elevate their brand personality. Using relatable lifestyle photography, a vibrant color palette, and clean layouts, Imarc created an easy-to-use, accessible user interface to help the FCI brand separate itself from its competition.
Rachel Lemieux
Engineering
Given the size of the site (we launched with over 200 franchises), it would’ve been completely unrealistic to create that amount of pages manually, so we devised a programmatic cloning system and had our content team input the bespoke data in the pre-populated fields. This allowed us to essentially pre-populate a large amount of sites easily so that the business could scale.
FCI’s content governance structure necessitated different permissions from corporate to franchisee. As WordPress doesn’t allow for varying permissions on a single block, we had to come up with global fields that could be edited by the corporate team and could inject the data into franchisee blocks to provide the right experience.
The shift from subdomain-based URLs to subdirectory-based URLs meant we needed to make a URL redirection plan. To attack this, we created a comprehensive URL map that moved them from an individual, 1:1 redirection to a rules-based redirection.
This project stretched our WordPress capabilities. We hit new challenges and met them head-on. Given the 8,515–page scale, it has increased our confidence moving into even larger and Enterprise clients who want WordPress sites exponentially.
Dave Anastasi
The results
The all-new FCI website launched on June 13, 2024, and the applause has been deafening.
As I scroll through the website on my phone, I’m so excited at how well-designed and user-friendly it is! This is going to be a game-changer for all of us.
Vera Shafiq, Location3 [A partner agency]
After the first 28 days, FCI recognized a 19% increase in organic sessions, and their clicks and traffic have held steady despite the changeover.
The future
Though the first iteration of this redesign focused on residential customers, we are working toward a dual global navigation strategy to serve both residential and commercial audiences to capture both and help them reach larger business goal heights. This strategy includes serving specific content and products so they can scale in a tailored way.
This WordPress project is one of our largest sites to date and the end product has us over the moon. We are excited to continue building relationships with the FCI team and partner agencies.