Vollrath Foodservice
Website Redesign
Vollrath Foodservice is a globally renowned manufacturer of commercial kitchen equipment. As they entered into a bold new era, they wanted a website redesign that could keep up with their growth, help them achieve their goals, and meet the needs of the diverse audiences using the site for wildly different reasons.
CI Design (CID) led this extensive digital transformation, providing a holistic approach that utilized expertise from multiple departments including digital strategy, content, UX, web development, and design.
The Research
The first step for every website we build is to learn as much as we can about the client, their audience, and what the new site needs to achieve. The bigger the site, the deeper the research. Since Vollrath was looking for a complete digital transformation, our team embarked on one of our deepest research phases yet, including:
- Pre-Discovery Prep
Vollrath provided a pre-workshop document outlining their high-level goals and desires for the site, reference for inspiration, and a wishlist of new site features. - Discovery Workshop
An in-person exploratory session that allowed our team to have a deeper understanding of Vollrath's goals, audience, and what role their website should play in achieving those goals. - Personas
Vollrath identified the five key end user types and their site needs. CID’s strategy team conducted independent research and phone interviews with members of Vollrath's professional network in order to validate, create, and refine the most accurate end user archetypes possible. - User Journey Maps
Using the approved personas as our guide, we established the persona-based pathways we’d need to create and the site features each persona would need in order to achieve their goals. - Digital, UX, Content, and Tech Assessments
With the approved goals and personas as our guiding star, our digital strategy, UX, content, and tech team specialists conducted individual assessments of the existing site in order to make recommendations that would yield the best possible new site. This phase of our research also involved an assessment of site analytics, heat maps, scroll maps, user testing, and more.
The Recommendations
In order to share our findings, the team consolidated their recommendations into a comprehensive 100+ page document and executive summary presentation, and presented them to key stakeholders at Vollrath over the course of two days. After an additional, abbreviated presentation and multiple rounds of critical approval, we were ready to make a new website.
The Build
This was a front-to-back collaborative effort.
Our DEV team was in constant collaboration with Vollrath’s logistics, IT, and marketing departments to identify the right platforms and applications (Kentico MVC, Salsify) for managing a site of this size, with a product catalog that exceeded 10k SKUs.
For the front-end, our UX/DESIGN, DIGITAL, and CONTENT specialists worked together to make sure every decision they made individually had full team buy-in and was created with the goals and personas in mind. Wireframes, module design, content refresh, image selection, and meta data were all created in concert with one another.
The Future
A truly great digital transformation is never finished. Websites should constantly evolve to meet their end user’s needs and support business goals. Over the next few years, Vollrath and CID will be rolling out additional phases of this brand new site, introducing new features for all users as well as persona-specific functionality, and creating new content to support a robust digital marketing program.
