Western Container Sales connects customers with steel shipping containers for storage all over North America. Their current website was antiquated with many usability issues and struggled to present a massive amount of information in a manner that made sense to the user. The owner wanted a modern website with a web 3.0 influenced feel that did three things well:
The website I designed will pull customers in with great visuals, help customers understand the process by answering any questions they have, and help to convert the container curious in to serious buyers.
The process for this project began with evaluating the current website, which was plagued with many problems ranging from bad visual design to confusing architecture, user flows were not obvious, and the process left customers with lots of questions. The owner of the company had prioritized random SEO phrases over good organization and succinct copy, all of which was confusing to the reader.
I researched competitor companies in the space, and there were very few good examples of sites that worked well. I then searched for some near competitors and found two great sites, XB Fullfillment and Estral, which gave a lot of inspiration for where to start the designs.
The current website design is dated, confusing to navigate, and difficult to find the information you need before purchasing a steel shipping container. Much of the copy is too focused on getting SEO ranking instead of clarity and being succinct. Customers are not seeing answers to basic questions and customer service spends too much time answering questions that should be easily answered on the website. Customers are not making it through the purchasing funnel and need help making decisions.
I spent a good amount of time pulling many paragraphs of copy from multiple pages that all mostly repeated the same information in different ways, and re-writing into digestible paragraphs which minimized the length and number of pages needed.
I was tasked with creating a new sitemap from the original website, but this was impossible without understanding which existing pages and sections were necessary. I catalogued the content of all the sections, and using card sorting, organized sections onto the key pages.
From the new page sections, I was able to create a more macro site map, which included all of the individual city location pages.
Much of the layout was able to be designed in the wireframes, which went together relatively quickly, and informed us a lot about the flow through the pages.
This was an amazing project to work on, and I grew a lot through it. Starting out, the scope of the site was a bit overwhelming to design by myself, but breaking it down into each of the design processes allowed me to tackle each bit one at a time. It took me a while to wrap my head around the steel shipping container sales process, but re-writing much of the copy helped me to really understand what the business owner was trying to communicate to his customers. There wasn't time or budget to prototype out the micro interactions and scrolling effects that were meant to be included in the final design. I can know tell you more than you need to know about the intricacies of conex storage containers and where in the country the intermodal depots are located.
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