trimteck.com
Web development solutions for global engineering manufacturer
Services Provided: E-Commerce, SEO, Web Design, Web Development
Client Background
Trimteck, LLC
Trimteck is one of those companies that are huge within their niche. The average person would have no idea who Trimteck is or what they do, but to engineers, Trimteck provides a vital service to the industry.
Trimteck produces specialized custom valves designed to suit the specific needs of every customer, all made to order. Trimteck offers the kind of versatility that has made their brand the one-stop-shop for engineers across the world, with offices throughout Europe and the Americas, as well as additional offices scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and beyond.
Trimteck offers a reliable product. You can tell because they’ve worked with such organizations as Shell, Exxon, Frito Lay, Campbells, NASA, the US Department of Defence, and so many more.
Trimteck services every industry involved in production. If there’s a need to limit the flow of a liquid, Trimteck is the first name that comes to mind.
We started working with Trimteck when they were already a well-established company. At over 30 years old, Trimteck already has a strong brand presence in their niche market.
Awesome Web Designs was brought in to work with Trimteck as a subcontractor. We worked with our colleagues Jason Petefish and Joshua Alexander on a project they had already put a lot of time into. The site’s design and aesthetic was finished when we started working on it, but that doesn’t mean we did nothing to contribute to the look and feel of Trimteck’s site since we started working with them.
Our main role in the collaborative effort that is Trimteck’s site has been back-end and front-end development. While we didn’t provide some of our usual services, such as web hosting and site maintenance, we did provide some important solutions that play a role in how well Trimteck can serve its customers.
The Challenge
Control valves for the World's most critical applications
We played a role in a few key aspects of this project. Starting small, we provided consultation for various parts of the job. We made several suggestions and carried many of them out ourselves upon approval. Much of our work was a direct result of our own consultancy.
We also brought the site in line with the privacy rules set out by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. Trimteck conducts a lot of business in Europe, so we wanted to make sure they could continue to serve the European market without any legal issues.
We adapted the entire architecture of the site to be crawler and SEO friendly. We linked pages together in a cohesive manner, used breadcrumbs throughout the site, improved written copy and titles, and, in all, increased site traffic by over 200%.
Our biggest individual contribution on the Trimteck job, however, was creating a smart e-commerce format with intelligent filters. The sites previous order form was severely limited in its capability, so we redesigned it from the ground up.
The way the e-commerce works is the user fills out a form that lists all their product needs. As they fill out the form, new fields appear as they need to be addressed. Since not every order necessitates every piece of information included on the form, it simplified the process for the user if we automatically filtered those fields out.
The form is also very long. We knew there were bound to be parts that people would have to double-check to make sure everything has been entered correctly, so we included personal profiles on the site that let people save and track all the order forms they’ve previously filled out. This way, they could save their progress half-way through a form without having to start over, and they can re-order a part with the exact specifications that they had in the past.
We weren’t concerned about how complicated the form was, however. We knew that Trimteck’s audience exclusively consisted of people in the engineering field. All of them would be coming to Trimteck because they already knew exactly what they wanted, so we made the e-commerce form to suit their needs as accurately as possible. Ultimately, a more complicated user experience would be more beneficial to the end-user in this case, so we had no problem with a hyper-specific request form.
After the e-commerce form has been filled out, the customer is directed to their nearest sales representative. Given the nature of the product, it wouldn’t be feasible to use the site as the point of sale. With the unique nature of every sale, there needs to be a human available to take notes and finalize everything with the user.
That’s why we included a map on the site that contained the geographic location of every Trimteck sales representative across the world. While there isn’t necessarily a representative in every country, the next best thing is whoever is closest. Every representative’s profile includes their phone number and email as well, that way they can be reached by people both locally and internationally.
As a whole, creating the e-commerce portion of the site was our biggest challenge, but in the end, we created an elegant solution to many problems that should go on to serve Trimteck for years to come.
We also created a customer support center where users can easily choose between aftermarket and maintenance needs, further enhancing the e-commerce experience.
The Solution
A jobs not over until it’s over
As it is, we’re still working with our partners on the Trimteck job to finish the site and improve it in ways that nobody thought of until just recently.
We’re continuing our SEO efforts in order to better improve the site’s traffic. To this end, we’re still optimizing copy and archived pages to enhance the on-site SEO. While we’ve already done most of the front facing work that people are most likely to see, there’s still a lot left to be done. We also plan on taking advantage of local SEO practices, that way Trimteck can take advantage of the many countries they’re located in.
We also intend to add Spanish support to the website. We found that there was a huge market in Latin America that was stumbling upon the English site using Spanish keywords. In order to suit their needs, we’re going to add Spanish support across the entire site, that way those users get what they need and Trimteck expands its business influence into a new market.
Given that we essentially helped design every page on the site, we know we’re just the people who can rewrite the entire domain in a new language.
In the end, our main concern was not creating a high end, professional site. Instead it was about usability. An engineer who needs parts from Trimteck isn’t going to care very much about the style of the site, they’re going to care about how effectively they can use the site to get what they need, and we embodied that perfectly in our approach. For Trimteck’s market, there was no need for frills.
Client Testimonial
What they say about us
The Results / Future Plans
Awesome Web Designs and Trimteck
Trimteck was a unique experience for us at Awesome Web Designs. Normally, we’re more involved in the conceptualization of the sites we work on, but in this case we were merely subcontractors. While we still contributed a lot to the sites design, we didn’t have much of a say in the look and feel of it.
This was for the best, however, as it ultimately gave us the ability to focus on the more dedicated tasks that were in front of us. Creating Trimteck’s unique ecommerce portal was both our biggest challenge and our greatest achievement on this project, though that’s not to say there isn’t a lot of work on this job ahead of us.
We still need to finish optimizing some of the archived portions of the site, and we also plan on improving Trimteck’s on-site and off-site SEO even further.
Overall, we’re proud of the user experience we’ve created for Trimteck. We wanted to make it easy for users to find what they need and we achieved that. In the future, we’ll continue to support Trimteck through our ongoing site consultancy, search engine optimization, and Spanish language translation.
As far as Awesome Web Designs’ projects go, this was one of a kind. The nature of the work we did was unique and highly specialized. We always like working with clients in niche industries like this because it gives us the opportunity to do interesting work that we wouldn’t usually come across. We look forward to more specialized work like this with Trimteck in the future.