Homepage redesign for simple personalization and easy updating.
Cole-Parmer’s homepage is one of the highest-traffic pages on the site, and it hadn’t been updated in nearly a decade. It needed a complete visual and structural overhaul to meet modern usability expectations and drive revenue, with no budget for full personalization and little content to fill it.
Revenue metrics rose 25% and average scroll depth increased. This is how I designed for the content we had, and for the content we hoped to get.
What changed
Each line jumps to the part of the story behind the number.
The goal was modern, the challenge was manual
Updating to modern usability and design expectations, using competitor benchmarks, was the fun part. The harder part was a homepage that had to be personalized by hand today while staying ready for dynamic personalization widgets later.
I structured each section of the new homepage so it could move, be edited, and house any content. That prepared it for fast, repeated updates for both short and long campaigns and promotions.
I knew the content we would be given was limited. So we built to fit those limits, and also to make it easy to push for more inspired content later.
Personal without personalization
The page had to carry the company’s value proposition and give Marketing simple ways to keep it fresh.
The budget wouldn’t allow what I wanted: a homepage with personalized content based on journey, region, or purchase history, along with cross-sell and upsell widgets.
The compromise was personalization I could get, in the form of each visitor’s recently viewed items. Combined with the need to showcase new products, promotions, and campaigns, it found a happy medium that let Marketing supply content easily and gave users a seamless experience.
What we were working with
The design had to fit inside a fixed framework and a tight schedule, and the site could not lose revenue while it changed.
- A fixed layout framework in Bloomreach CMS
- An extremely tight timeline with limited development resources
- Guiding engineering to build the new page template from scratch
- No revenue disruption during the transition
How we designed for content we didn’t have yet
We researched widely and iterated often to land on a design that fit the limited content we would get and the way launches and campaigns tend to promote. Several departments had stories to tell, so we kept a balance of products, services, articles, search, and brands, and stayed open to adding new suggestions at short notice.
- Researched widelyI studied the main competitor and non-competitor websites in B2B and B2C for inspiration. I even found ideas outside homepages, such as for the Account area, and added them to the backlog.
- Designed concepts as guidesMy concepts helped junior designers weigh internal and external customers’ needs, not only how the page looked.
- Passed on a full-width heroI debated a hero spanning the whole page and decided against it. Fitting imagery wasn’t likely to exist, and promotions alongside product launches would need a constant companion slot to show them off.
- Guided the CMS template buildI guided engineering on the Bloomreach CMS template so it could be customized to Marketing’s expectations and stay open to scalable widgets later.
- Owned the content calendarAfter launch I owned the homepage content calendar and coordinated with Marketing on promotions and campaign alignment.
- Watched the numbersI monitored scroll depth, click behavior, and revenue metrics in Google Analytics, Qlik, and Glassbox.
A page Marketing can keep fresh
The redesign improved visual hierarchy and scannability so buyers could decide faster, and it strengthened the homepage’s value proposition for B2B buyers.
It also set up a scalable content operations model with a managed editorial calendar, which continues to serve the site today.
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