Custom Product Catalog Overhaul for Flomatic Valves
Since 1993, Flomatic Valves has focused on the design, development and manufacturing of high-quality valve products for the water and wastewater industries. They came to Mannix with an outdated website built in a custom content management system (CMS) that was inflexible to meet the needs of clients and was greatly limited in what could be achieved online.
The old site did not take advantage of shared content and therefore any change to any page would have to painstakingly be made individually on all pages. They were unable to set up SEO friendly page names based on each individual model number and revising pricing and making specification changes was challenging and incredibly time-consuming. Even further, security quickly became a concern as they had multiple website attacks as well as issues with the security of their site as a whole. With all of these countless issues in mind, Mannix’s team of web development experts got to work.
The new homepage prominently features a site search function so that users may search the product catalog with ease. Additional technical resources and data are readily available and if a user needs help they can easily locate several contact CTAs at multiple points on the page. Each element is designed for an efficient and intuitive user experience.
The old site included upwards of 200 pages of static content unrelated to the product catalog that needed significant clean up, modifications and optimization. By utilizing our SEO focused, responsive web design we have built a site for Flomatic that is performing 3X faster than the old site, landing an “A” rating on GTMetrix.
Product Data Management
The Back End
Since a significant portion of the site was built on static HTML we needed to switch over to a database designed for speed and flexibility moving forward. Our team got to work migrating the current website’s product data into MySQL. By converting this data during migration we were able to ensure that the information would appear in a more cogent and efficient manner within the database.
Our import included:
- Product Categories
- Product Data
- Product Images
However, not all the product data could easily be imported into MySQL because much of the product content that originally had appeared dynamic on the old site was actually HTML stored in the Access Products row.
In order to make this data manageable through the new system, it needed to be broken out of its HTML code and added to the database for dynamic management. Our team skillfully automated this process by writing scripts. Such scripts rely on the homogeneity of the HTML, meaning that the same HTML model used for one product can be used identically for the next.
The Front End
With the data now imported into the WordPress database, we created a WordPress plugin that allows the data to be browsed and traversed on the site. By taking the new catalog and product design and integrating them with the database we were able to create a fully functional custom product area for the client to browse.
Dashboard
For product management purposes we created an Admin Dashboard allowing the WordPress administrators to manage all the newly migrated data. The area enables users to add, edit or delete both products and categories as well as related content like literature, tech specs, sizes and pricing.
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Their collaborative approach ensured that the final product not only met but exceeded our expectations, resulting in a website that not only maintains its SEO strength but also boasts enhanced visibility and performance.
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