Multilingual Digital Product Catalog
- Duration:
- 9 months
- Role:
- Project Lead, Account Director, Creative Director, Design, UX
- Agency:
- Narwhal Digital
Hope Industrial had a very interesting challenge. They wanted a new website, but didn’t want to lose any of their current content or structure. This expedited our creative process, as we used their current designs as wireframes. From there, we refined the overall structure, developing unique content modules and page templates. The site was ultimately developed as a full featured product catalog — accepting imports from SAP and allowing management for several different languages all within the one WordPress instance.
The product detail pages were especially challenging, needing to accommodate nearly every type of spec a client could want. In addition, high resolution views of the products were needed along with related documentation. For this, flexible content templates were developed, allowing for easy creation of product pages and all the specs their customers desired.
Search and Mobile as Central Features
Hope’s customers are used to searching for what they need, as opposed to browsing through the catalog. For this, a custom search appliance was developed, which combed through the site and incorporated tags, taxonomies and key words & phrases. The search allows for live search results as users type, pulling up documentation, products and blog posts all within the language of the user.
Mobile and responsive was lacking in the original site. For this redesign, mobile was a driving factor. Each page was designed to work as well on a small screen as it does on a large one — and every size in-between.
The site was designed to mange multiple languages. Currently, the site supports seven languages, each managed independently within the single WordPress instance. Content can be copied, carried over or overwritten on a per language basis. Currency is automatically updated based on the active language domain.
In addition to the redesigned site, an on-site photoshoot was organized to develop new assets for the marketing team.
