Emakina Academy #13 : Betafence Website

Betafence Website Philip Achten The Reference

Betafence Website
About Betafence
Leader in the fencing industry
More than 125 years of exellence
€ 500 million TO in 2008
2.000 employees
13 plants in 12 countries
25 sales offices & agencies
Customers in more than 100 countries

Betafence Website
Challenge (1)
Betafence builds and sells an incredible range of products
Residential applications (e.g. fencing systems for gardens)
Farming products (hunting grounds, horticulture…)
Industrial & public sector (access controls, detection systems…)
Welded mesh for industry (glass reinforcement, pipelines…)
-> How is it possible to present such a wide catalogue in a coherent, yet user-friendly, interface ?

Betafence Website
Challenge (2)
Betafence had a lot of trouble with the previous website
Impossible to operate in "Internet-time" and with "Internet dynamics"
Decentralized content input and translation issues
Potentially risky lock-in by in-house, proprietary platform & tools
Hidden costs

Betafence Website
Key Objectives
Build a world class corporate website that fulfils the following missions:
Strengthen Betafence’s worldwide Internet presence
Serve the information needs of the target groups
* Professional prospects
* Residential prospects
* Prescribers
* Direct customers
* Indirect customers
3. Provide decentralized content management with the implementation of Sitecore as Content Management solution

Betafence Website
Why Sitecore ?
.Net technology
Already used by large accounts
Excellent content editing features
Web-based
Page Editor (in site editing)
Content Editor & Preview
Flexible workflow (Workbox)
Multi-lingual
SEO-friendly
Allows communication department to manage the site and leverage decentralized content input and translation

Betafence Website
Sitecore : CMS & Application Platform

Betafence Website
Making the catalogue more user-friendly (1)
As we already emphasized, guiding the customers through the products catalogue is a key issue for Betafence
Sometimes, you know the purpose of the product... but not the product itself
The Reference imagined a brand new navigation with four entry doors: browse the catalogue by application areas, by product group, by “full text” (search box) or by using an interactive form (“narrow down” approach)

Betafence Website

Betafence Website
Search Results

Betafence Website
Compare Results

Betafence Website
Making the catalogue more user-friendly (2)
The Reference also created an online specification generator called “Specify Me”
This interactive feature helps prescribers to find the best suited product in a 3-steps process and download the technical drawings, brochure pages and RFP
Thanks to the Ajax technology, the interface provides a desktop-like experience (no page reload)

Betafence Website

Betafence Website
International rollout (1)
Currently released in UK & Benelux
Next phase: Italy & Poland
In total: about 15 languages including Chinese, Turkish, Lithuanian...
Betafence needed an agile platform to easily add a new country or language. Sitecore offers the following key concepts for this:
Country/language extensibility
Content reuse
Workflow
Translation

Betafence Website
International rollout (2)
Sitecore provides a versatile framework for managing multiple countries & languages
An entire language tree can be copied
Easy switching between languages
Translation view
A content repository is used for reusing shared content
such as the product catalogue

Betafence Website

Betafence Website
Business Benefit
Robust platform to manage the same content at a worldwide level
Easy deployment for each subsidiary
State-of-the-art catalogue positioning Betafence as an innovative brand and a key actor in its sector
The catalogue is a business generator as it provides a comprehensive and intuitive overview of the products made by Betafence

Thank You ! Any Questions ?

Emakina Academy #13 : Betafence Website

by Emakina on May 05, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

Statistics

Emakina Academy #13 : Betafence Website — Presentation Transcript