Smith-Midland Corporation Case Study | WordPress Website Redesign

The Challenge

Make the Online Experience as Solid as Their In-Person One

Smith-Midland and their sub-brand, Concrete Safety Systems, develop and manufacture innovative precast concrete products for construction, transportation, utility, and safety applications. While their products are quite literally rock solid, their online brand was fractured across outdated and inconsistent regional sites, leaving customers and potential new hires alike with the impression of a smaller, less technically-advanced business.

Old Smith-Midland website prior to our redesign

Restrictive Design

The site's design was outdated and felt static and inflexible. It didn’t provide space to feature interactive content like video, or include calls to action to help visitors convert into leads.

Lackluster Recruiting Experience

Smith-Midland’s people are the core of their employee-centric culture, and they aim to showcase their team as much as their products. Their old sites did not accomplish this, and even hurt their recruiting efforts.

Too Many Regional Sites

Each of the company’s locations had their own site, and the branding was inconsistent across them. This resulted in duplicate content, an unwieldy amount of pages to manage, and a confusing experience for customers.

Our Solution

Address Infrastructure, Conversion and Design Challenges

Step one was a detailed user experience (UX) audit, putting the visitors first. From there, our strategy was multifaceted: unifying the brand, consolidating regional sites into two consistent sister sites, crafting content recommendations, building prominent calls to action, and thoughtfully reworking both sites’ structure and flow to make the visitor’s journey seamless.

We took a design challenge, that the company’s brand doesn’t have many visual elements to it, and created a cohesive look that connects both sites and gives a nod to their products and logo in subtle yet meaningful ways.

Focus on User Experience

We audited their existing sites and several competitors to identify opportunities for improvement. From our findings, we designed a new information architecture to unify the company’s messaging and design a purposeful visitor flow.

Add Multimedia & Conversion Points

The site is built to feature YouTube videos and other multimedia. We made use of embedded lead forms and made their primary call to action prominent, bringing into a sticky widget and the drop-down navigation.

Use Design to Differentiate

Bold design choices differentiate from the competition. From the logo, we pulled an orange block, trapezoidal shapes and other elements into the site. Large, striking images of their products and people are used throughout, along with a subtle concrete background texture.

The Result

A Cohesive Digital Experience That’s Also Easier to Manage

The resulting sites are streamlined, with no duplicate content and a more manageable page count. Their bold, modern designs are unique in their space, feel related to one another, and are enhanced with embedded videos. Site visitors have a clearly defined path to follow, with plenty of opportunities to convert into new leads.

Both sites were moved from an older, more cumbersome CMS onto Wordpress, making them user-friendly for anyone to edit (no more funneling all changes through one person!). Wordpress sites are also easy to keep maintained and secure.

Unify Brand & Improve UX

Make the Online Experience as Solid as Their In-Person One

Address Infrastructure, Conversion and Design Challenges

A Cohesive Digital Experience That’s Also Easier to Manage