New Website a Sizable "Advance" in Web Marketing Strategy

Summary

Advance, a division of Nilfisk-Advance, had only a one-page site for their North America operations. They needed a new site to showcase Advance floor cleaning machines that was inline with their corporate marketing guidelines. Equally as important, they also needed a content management system to store their marketing and technical product data for multiple uses throughout the company.

Challenge

Flexibility was key with the new site. First of all, we had to design one that had room to grow and could eventually integrate with a backend ERP system for e-commerce. Also,  this was the first of several redesign projects for Nilfisk-Advance's North America operations; a lot of upfront planning and strategy were involved so the other brands could benefit. We had to build a sound content structure that was reusable for the other divisions. In other words, when applied to the other websites, the structure for Advance's site had to make sense for the others as well.

Solution

The CMS that we used was Sitecore, a content management system of excellent functionality and flexibility built on the Microsoft .NET framework. This is why it was the perfect choice for this project. Its flexibility allowed us to customize the CMS so that one Sitecore content template could be shared among the websites for the other divisions and many other back-end applications could plug right into the CMS.

With the website's future in mind, we developed plans to integrate Advance's site with their existing extranet,  to allow for e-commerce later.

Results

Advance now has the capability to do online marketing promotions to build awareness of their products via the website. The new site affords them interactivity with customers and prospects on the web that they hadn't had before with Flash-based online promotions and contests.