Using faceted search to sift through soil products

Overview

Camden Soil Mix provides products and services to customers in horticulture, agriculture, viticulture, civil works and commercial landscaping; as well as services in earth management to local councils.

Customers rely on the diverse range of sustainable, organic products on offer, and need the ability to find the right product to suit their growing or landscaping application.

Following acquisition by WSN Environmental Solutions, the business undertook a market analysis and segmentation project and, from this, developed a focused strategy to engage key categories of customers. They sought to re-design the website with these customers top of mind – so that each market segment could find what they were looking for quickly and easily.

Bienalto was engaged to devise the new site. The resulting architecture – which utilises faceted search on the Wordpress platform – intuitively guides customers to the products they seek; whilst remaining supportive of WSN’s design aesthetic and sustainability focus.

Challenge

The acquisition of Camden Soil Mix by WSN in 2008 was a great incentive to update the company’s website.

We really needed to reflect our current activities – that is, producing and delivering organic materials throughout NSW – while building a site that would support our plans for diversifying the business,” said Kate Concannon, Marketing & Communications Officer, WSN.

With the new site, Camden Soil Mix sought to identify each market segment the business seeks to deal with – and group relevant products and environmental messages under each segment.

Working out how to channel customers to the right products was probably our biggest challenge. Having Bienalto clarify and convert the vision for the look, layout and functionality of the site into spot-on design and architecture was the easy part,” said Concannon.

Solution

To cater for all market segments, simple search functionality wouldn’t cut it. Bienalto sought a more intuitive, user-friendly approach – and faceted search fit the bill nicely.

Faceted search (or faceted navigation) – which allows a user to hunt for information via a number of different pathways – is popular on e-commerce sites for its ability to help users find what they want much faster.

Although Camden Soil Mix is not yet an e-commerce site, faceted search works well here too. It enables the logical grouping of products according to their ‘application’ (e.g. Civil Works, Nurseries, Orchards) and ‘type’ (e.g. Mulch, Compost).

Bienalto recommended WordPress for the site’s content management framework. Offering clients’ incredible ease of use and flexibility, WordPress is Bienalto’s platform of choice from a cost and performance perspective.

For Camden Soil Mix’s site, Bienalto started with a blank WordPress theme, designed the site to align with the client’s brand and incorporated proven WordPress plug-ins to match the client’s exact requirements.

Bienalto is one of the major WordPress developers in Australia now, and our expertise is being passed on to our clients in the development of sites such as this one,” said Hurol Inan.

“Our knowledge of WordPress, coupled with our strong background in information architecture and usability design, means that clients are getting the best of both worlds – a cost-effective build and a high-performing website.”

Results

The new site achieves the business objectives of driving brand awareness and providing segment-tailored education around products and their associated environmental benefits.

Camden Soil Mix now has an easy-to-use interface, which makes site updates and the addition of new products and services a breeze.

The Bienalto team managed to strike a balance between realising our vision and providing valuable input of their own to help shape this. They were very attentive to our objectives and put forward insightful and practical suggestions that significantly improved the end result,” said Concannon.