COIT

It had been years since the COIT site had been updated, and it was no longer relevant from a user perspective.

The navigation was not streamlined to services, the mobile experience wasn’t optimized for conversions, and it was difficult for users to take action.

Plus, their largest competitor had just completed an overhaul of their site. It was time to clean house.

The new site had to meet some key requirements. For example, with multiple locations in two countries, it was critical to maintain and improve geolocation. Also, each franchise needed the ability to offer and maintain custom promotions tailored to its location.

It also needed to facilitate three main conversion goals:

• for users to schedule services via an online form,
• get people to call the phone number for a specific franchisee,
• and to request a quote online.

However, it was also critical to not disrupt the existing SEM. We needed to re-architect the site to better meet Drupal best practices and to ease centralized content management, but we had to ensure this wouldn’t result in franchises losing their hard-won search engine visibility.

Since this was a corporate site with 100+ microsites, Drupal was the perfect choice to accommodate these requirements and their complexity — while still allowing for a focus on visual design.

There were three main areas where the project made the greatest impact: geolocation, streamlined forms, and easier franchise-specific content editing.

Improved geolocation

We integrated geolocation to redirect users to their closest franchise location (this also solved the issue of users from Canada accessing the United States site.) Not only did we maintain the existing franchise promotions model, but we also expanded upon its features and management.

Simple, intuitive forms

On the previous site, there were two forms: a ‘request quote’ form and a “schedule” form — with a daunting 30 fields!

We streamlined this into a simple three-step process that started by asking users, ‘what do you want to do?’, providing them with the correct form based on their response.

The geolocation feature also allowed COIT to drop users deeper into the form based on their location, allowing them to access their local franchise’s current promotions.

Franchise-specific content

We also needed to fix the disjointed process of adding and editing content from the admin interface. We implemented domain access so that COIT team members can easily add pages to either the US or the Canadian site — and so that each franchise can add pages according to the specific services they provide:

• For example, if a franchise does not offer drapery cleaning, its content editors don’t need to create that page.
• However, COIT’s corporate office doesn’t want to lose the customer leads looking for drapery cleaning.
• To prevent losing these leads, links to all services appear on each franchise mini-site, but the user is redirected to the corporate page whenever the franchise doesn’t offer a specific service — so the lead is still captured.

The CMS allows editors to surface important services on each franchise homepage and layout to promote the services that each franchise wants to highlight. Flexible layouts allow COIT to add content at will and build pages based on their needs.