Old Website Needing to Be Rebuilt

Compass Pool Centre Newcastle is an authorised Compass Pools Australia dealership based in Newcastle. We deliver high quality fibreglass swimming pools throughout the Newcastle and Hunter region in NSW, Australia. Thanks to hundreds of satisfied customers, we have had a lot of new leads each month. However, to reach more people interested in buying a swimming pool, we needed to improve our online presence.

The old website was being used for several years and was not really updated. Thus, some of the information were outdated and other missing. The website did not feature enough content and because of this, we could not aim at higher positions in search engines’ search results pages. It needed a visual redesign, structural change, and technical modernisation to keep pace with current website development trends and industry best-practices.

New Project Starting in April 2016

In April 2016, the new website project started. Catnapweb.com.au was selected as the contractor for developing the new website. They have worked with Compass Pools Australia on several projects since December 2015 and thanks to this, they knew the environment and Compass products well and could build the new website including content and optimisation for search engines.

In May 2016, the new website was launched on the compassnewcastle.com.au domain. It featured a completely new design, a lot of fresh content, and it was optimised for mobile devices and search engines. Within the new website, a lot of content is dedicated to precisely describe pool shapes and parameters unique to Compass pools, technologies that help customers enjoy Compass pool without the need of everyday care and show pool installation pictures as the inspiration for new customers. There are numerous unique features on the website. For example, each pool shape can be rotated in 3D by the website visitor, thus enabling exploring the pool from all sides. The shape page also features description of the shape, table with available sizes and nice photo gallery with selected installations of the pool shape.

Unique Content on the Website

The website features a lot of new content including secret weapons distinguishing Compass from other pool manufacturers and Advice section with useful information for all prospective and current pool owners. One of the innovations that were implemented on this website, is a set of Call to Actions. Except of the standard contact form, another chances to interact with the company were created and offered to website visitors. One of them is the page introducing printed version of Pool Magazine. This magazine was created by Compass Pools Australia as a comprehensive material containing the best information about pool ownership. The Pool Buyers Guide, as we call the magazine, has 70 pages full of information on selecting the right pool, costs to buy a pool, pool ownership costs and much more. It has been a great success to get in touch with people through this offer. Because the magazine is sent to everyone for free, many people have requested it since the launch of the new website.

Also, another new service was added to the website. In 2016, Compass Pools Australia have introduced a new range of complementary products. These can be added to a standard fibreglass swimming pool to create unique, customised fibreglass pools. This concept has been named Customise your pool and we introduced it to the website visitors on a separate page. Here, they can find information about Maxi Rib technology, beach zones, grand entry benches, pool and spa water combos, and various water features.

Technical Solution

The new website runs on WordPress, currently the 4.7 version. It is built using The7 universal theme that has probably the most features on today’s theme market and is very flexible and versatile. There were several challenges we needed to go conquer when building the website. One of them was selecting the best solution for generating the 3D rotations. We already had 3D models of all our pools ready, now we needed to add surface material to it and export it to an image sequence usable for 3D rotation. We have spent hours and hours testing different number of pictures in the export, their quality and resolution and dozens of WordPress plugins. Finally, we have found out that the only suitable solution for us is the Smart Product Viewer plugin. We have found a balance between the usability of the rotation and the performance of the website. To optimise the user experience, we did not replace the static 3D pool shape representation located on top of the page, but added the interactive pool rotation to the bottom. With this solution in place, user coming to the website does not need to wait until the rotation is loaded and by the time he comes to this part, it is ready for interaction.

The website contains several forms that collect information from website visitors. They are built with the use of Gravity Forms and stored in the database. Soon after the launch we realised that we are getting spam request sent through the forms. We discussed possible solutions and wanted to implement captcha to stop spam robots filling in the form details. However, Andrej from Catnapweb.com.au came with a suggestion to use CleanTalk, which was already tested on several other websites by him. This solution, despite being quite new, has many advantages over traditional protection. The main is that it does not require and action from the website user and thus, it does not decrease the conversion rate. After setting it up, we have monitored the weekly reports from CleanTalk to determine, if any real requests were not blocked. After several months of running CleanTalk we can happily confirm that the flasepositive rate is 0 and no real request was blocked by CleanTalk. It is very impressive and everyone is happy with this service.

After 7 months running, we can see the website has started generating a lot of relevant requests. We have the chance to get in touch with people needing more information about swimming pools and we are happy to assist them in their purchasing a pool decision making process.

Compass Pool Centre Newcastle New Website Project 2016

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