New website for The BIL Group

It’s been a busy summer for the Pink Fish team as we’ve been building a new website for the BIL Group in Calne, Wiltshire.

Following a company-wide re-branding exercise in January of this year, we were asked to bring BIL’s three websites – BIL Group, Castors & Wheels and Materials Handling – together on one site under one unified domain.

This meant transferring over 10,000 products, 200 product categories and a multitude of pages which had been optimised for organic SEO. Included in that were more than 5GB of imagery and 20GB of PDF and CAD files – it was a fairly significant undertaking.

This project wasn’t just about moving data though. Bringing three sites together into one came with its own usability challenges, and we needed to be sure that visitors to the new site would be able to find the products and information they were looking for without feeling as if the single site was separated into its three original parts.

We definitely didn’t want a “Castors & Wheels” section to sit alongside a “Materials Handling” section hanging off the homepage, but of course appreciated that there would inevitably be some sort of division in this way.

With over 10,000 products on the site, many of which were visually similar and only differentiated by things like size and load capacity, we also wanted to make it easier for customers to quickly focus in on the products they needed.

Concepts and wireframes

We began where we always like to begin – with a meeting.

We used our first face-to-face meeting to try and better understand how BIL wanted to operate, how the administration team processed enquiries and how the warehouse was structured to pick, pack and ship orders.

We had lots of Analytics data from Google to help us to understand how visitors used the website, and could draw on our own experience of setting up e-commerce shops to offer insights into potential improvements.

Once we had a better understanding of the business and the existing sites, we put (virtual) pen to (virtual) paper and sketched out some ideas in a usable prototype wireframe. This was then further refined back in the office, and presented to the BIL management team in a second face-to-face planning meeting.

The wireframe was refined over several weeks – desktop versions, tablet versions and mobile versions – and the architecture took shape.

Design & build

Once we’d settled on our wireframe, the functionality we wanted to build, and the overall site architecture we moved to the visual design phase. The colours, logo and overall brand had already been identified but it took a couple of design iterations to settle on the look and feel for the new website.

We then progressed to build and spent most of the past two months working on setting up the templates and transferring the data.

Moving from one WordPress platform to another WordPress platform made the task of transferring product data relatively straightforward, but there was still a lot of work to do around the new help centre, product categories and transferring a lot of SEO-optimised content.

Features and functionality

Included in this project was a complete reworking of the AluTruk Build Your Own facility – a tool that allows you to build your own sack truck from a selection of components but (crucially) to see a CAD visualisation of the finished product from the components chosen.

The original version used a very basic (and now abandoned) plugin so we needed to build a new version from scratch. Basing it on WooCommerce Composite Products, we extended the functionality with a conditional imagery plugin to allow us to build up the finished image and ensure that the various parts overlapped in the expected way. The previous version didn’t quite achieve this, but the new version excels.

We also needed to accommodate SAP for stock control, pricing updates and order processing. This part of the project will be added post-launch.

Launch

The site was launched at the end of September 2023 and we are (rightly) very proud of the effort that went into creating this for BIL. We hope it achieves everything they were expecting.

Have a look at the new site now and see what you think.