Websites: at the end of the day, they’re such a simple thing, aren’t they? They’re just digital assets that help you connect with audiences in the online world. But let’s be honest. For lots of businesses out there, managing and maintaining these digital assets can be messy at times.
Dycem was one of those businesses.
If you haven’t heard of Dycem, let us introduce you: this British company is a world leader in contamination control. They’re known for their innovative floor mats which trap dirt from shoes and wheels, prevent particle growth, and stop germs and bacteria from entering sanitised environments. They work with food companies, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, and more.
Dycem have been in operation for more than 50 years, and as you can probably imagine, they’ve built up a huge client base – and a large product inventory – during this time. Trying to please everyone, the company ended up with 13 separate websites in total, all serving similar purposes.
Managing them was becoming increasingly challenging, so the Dycem team came to us here at Soto. They wanted to amalgamate all the sites into one, using a fresh, modern theme.
13 Websites?
Yes, really! With clients all over the world, in various different industries, and interested in different products, Dycem had worked to build a variety of websites to meet a range of needs and requirements. While this approach had worked well initially, the sites were starting to get old. It was becoming tedious to manage them all, and they were succumbing to a multitude of errors.
Perhaps even more worryingly, they were in a bit of an SEO pickle. Six of the sites were essentially carbon copies of each other, each in a different language. And with Google expanding its ranking factors, these sites were now competing against each other for SERPs visibility.
We’ve worked with Dycem for several years, so we knew their business well and spent a long time discussing the best approach. We needed to figure out how to merge all the sites in a way that would enable us to achieve two really important things:
- Keep everything simple for users, and make sure they could easily find information that’s relevant to them. With everything being relocated onto one site, we didn’t want users to get lost!
- Distinguish between two key areas of business – contamination control and non-slip mats – while still making sure Google could recognise both sides as being part of the same global Dycem identity.
Challenging? You could say that! Impossible? Not for Soto.
Delivering excellence
Wanting a fresh look, Dycem were working with a design team who were able to provide us with the layouts for 40 of the key pages. This was a massive help, as we knew exactly what Dycem wanted, and we were able to develop templates that would allow us to make these layouts a reality.
The main reason for working with templates in this way was that it was the simplest way to get the job done. We could split the designs into modules, build one of each, refine, and optimise before splitting them across the site. But there was another added bonus of working in this way.
With the templates all sorted, we were able to hand these over to Dycem. They now had what they needed for building new pages in the future, so their site could grow with the business. We even suggested that Dycem could expand on these templates, build on them, and create their own.
And they did just that!
“I love how Dycem have run with what we’ve built for them, and expanded on it themselves. They’ve really leaned into the tools we’ve built for them, and the site has grown and changed in amazing ways. This spirit is really why we build websites; I love empowering people to work on and improve their own sites, and take control of their online presence, so it’s been really nice to see that in action.”
– Zoey O’Neill, MD, Soto
There was just one thing left to address: the language barrier. We knew we couldn’t move forward with six versions of the site, all in different languages. So instead we used the WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML). This allowed us to build just one website that would display the relevant language for the region, completely eliminating the previous SEO issue.
One site, unlimited opportunities
This was one of our biggest projects here at Soto, and as it was important for us all to get it right, rather than do it fast, it was probably one of our lengthiest, too. Despite the challenges, Dycem found that their leads shot through the roof with the new site, and saw a major boost in SEO, too.
“The resulting site today is an amazing culmination of collaborative efforts between so many people. Working together, we’ve been able to develop a site that’s clean, consistent, and simple, while still delivering an incredible user experience for Dycem’s growing customer base, all over the world”.
– Zoey O’Neill, MD, Soto
