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Krost Business Furniture

Krost Business Furniture is a leading Australian owned commercial furniture manufacturer and supplier. Krost provides tailored office solutions, directly to businesses and government organisations, and via interior designers, architects and builders. Krost primarily services the Sydney region, while its sister company, Klein Business Furniture, services the Melbourne region.

The Challenge

The website is central to our business success. It’s often the first place new and existing customers look for furniture when they’re in the purchasing cycle. Visually the website sells the product and provides the necessary information for potential buyers. We’ve been using the Elcom CMS to run our website since 2002. Every 4 or 5 years we go through a major redesign to keep on top of design trends and technology changes.

For our latest redesign, we wanted everything in a much more responsive design to optimise mobile and tablet viewing. We also wanted to showcase our products through large visually appealing images, improve search and maintain fast site loading.

Our goal was to give buyers the best online experience possible, while making sure the website reflects the brand well and is easy for our non-technical marketing team to keep up-to-date and relevant.

By and large, for a website CMS and company that can help us – Elcom has been a very good fit for us and we’ve grown with Elcom too. They have the ability to customise our website and make it look exactly the way we want, with a team of experts to support you during and beyond the project. Tyron Krost, Director
Krost Business Furniture

 

Krost Business Furniture - Responsive Website


 

The Solution

We’ve had a great working relationship with the Elcom team, and their product serves our needs well. There was no question we would continue with the Elcom platform when we started the new project.

We were very specific about the look and feel of it. This time around we put together a detailed brief for Elcom with wireframes and the design and layout mapped out. The Elcom team then provided user interface (UI) information and worked closely with us on UI design tweaks to optimise the experience for our audience.

The project was run very professionally. Our Project Manager was very responsive and willing to go the extra mile to create the right solution for us. It was an easy process for Elcom to build the website to our specifications. The turnaround was very quick; we started the project in early September and launched at the end of January the following year.

Both the Krost and Klein websites are configured as multi-sites on one Elcom CMS deployment. The Krost marketing team in Sydney manages both websites to keep the messaging and content consistent. This lets us share a central database to manage and access common assets such as product images and pages, reducing the maintenance required. The new look and feel was applied to both websites with a subtle difference in content and images such as the logo shown.


We redesigned the Project Gallery to better highlight solutions we’ve tailored for clients. What we like most is the featured products section which links directly to the product page. From the backend interface, we simply select the relevant taxonomy. This makes it easy for customers to find more information about the products used.

The Product navigation menu displays a drop-down featuring the front page of the latest catalogue, with a strong call to action to order the catalogue. This links through to the ‘Get a Catalogue’ page with a form to capture new leads. Once submitted, a workflow is triggered to email the marketing team to mail the catalogue out.

Dynamic widgets make it easy for us to manage content across the website. For example, when we update the blog section, it pulls through the post title, image and taxonomy of the latest blog posts and displays it on the homepage. Visitors can then view all blogs by default or select only news, product or project focused blog posts to view.


The payments page helps us guarantee payments since we can organise a payment from buyers on the spot. This page is linked to eWay, a secure payment gateway. We can automatically fill in the form before sending it to buyers to pay. Sometimes our sales team sell products over the phone and this provides another option to pay online. Once a form is filled out, accounts receives a notification of the payment.

The Benefits

  • When the website redesign went live, we saw an immediate increase in visits and users. In the 12-month period since launching, overall website visits increased by 25% and the number of users increased by 21%. The number of mobile users increased significantly, up 73% as a result of new optimised mobile experience.
  • Across the business, we had a good year in terms of sales and the website certainly contributed to this. We’ve seen an increase in online form requests to contact sales and receive a catalogue since the redesign. Also, when the sales team are on the phone with a prospective buyer, they walk them through our products and projects on the website. If buyers are ready to purchase, they can provide payment instantly online. It's impressive how well the website highlights our products, creates a good impression of the brand and helps convert potential buyers into customers.
  • We don't have an in-house IT team at Krost. Our marketing team manages the website which is quite easy for them to update. We're fully supported by Elcom's highly skilled Helpdesk team and work directly with them if we need any additional information or assistance. They’ve always been responsive, and we get step by step instructions on how to do tasks.
  • Using the multi-site function to deploy both the Krost and Klein websites on one Elcom CMS instance provides us with many benefits. We were able to apply the redesign to both websites simultaneously, reducing the overall redesign cost. We also only had to upgrade to the latest CMS version once since we have a single application stack, leading to lower maintenance cost and a faster go live time. Finally, both websites share a central database of images and content, requiring less infrastructure requirement (namely, hosting services provided by Elcom) and reduced operational costs.

 

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