Brewer Fitness, launched in 1990, specializes in a mix of creative climbing structures for all types of customers, designed and built with thoughtful craftsmanship. They’ve pioneered many training and climbing innovations and have single handedly opened up climbing as a mainstream fitness tool – a category they’ve dubbed Vertical Movement.
Brewer has placed products in more than 41 countries in both training facilities and homes from the most demanding rehab environments to a quiet training studio to a noisy high school weight room. They thrive in offering unique training options for adults, children, and seniors.
Despite going through five different website designs, the site was not adequately handling Brewer’s needs. The company contracted with pixelslam to develop a site that met all its requirements.
Meeting multiple objectives
When developing the plan to upgrade the site, the pixelslam team needed to address several key shortcomings:
Confusing navigation – Site visitors were getting lost and frustrated by their inability to get to the areas of the site they needed.
Inability to conduct eCommerce – Brewer previously had eCommerce on the site, but at some point discontinued that ability. Moving forward, the client wanted to be able to sell accessories as well as customizable equipment.
No social media integration – As Brewer continued to establish relationships with its customers and prospects, the site lacked the capability to leverage social media and the traction it was gaining through a dedicated following of customers.
Inability to update easily – The company was looking to expand it’s “Athlete’s Focus” area by adding renowned users of the equipment. However, updating the site to make that happen with the existing design was a cumbersome process.
Limited resource access – Brewer offered its visitors a number of training resources, but the current design was not user-friendly and finding the resources on the site was difficult.
Working out the problem solutions
pixelslam’s first step in addressing the existing site challenges was developing a complete redesign built on WordPress. The existing site had been built using the Joomla content management system which while an appealing CMS for designers, is not as flexible and easy to adapt for non-technical users.
The team solved two problems at once by dealing with the navigation issue using an eCommerce approach and employing a mega-menu. Visitors were able to more readily find what they were looking for with fewer clicks by quickly navigating among the thumbnail images of the products. Product shots included short descriptions highlighting key elements of each product such as climbing focus, small footprint, all-purpose, or home climbing.
The site launched with a small WooCommerce store to sell accessories and establishes a system for future enhancements, including allowing customers to build and configure the equipment they want.
The next step was focused on the athletes area. The WordPress design now allows Brewer to easily add big-name climbers who use their equipment. It will also be simple for them to build a broader community where athletes can share climbing stories and exercise workout routines using Brewer equipment.
The training resources section was redesigned to make each workout its own post and created a filterable page where visitors can select only the cardio, or other programs related to Treadwall or Ladderwall equipment.
Links were added to include Brewer’s growing partners and dealers complete with a “where to buy” section. The page included a log in for dealers allowing Brewer to create resources that dealers could access for a more robust, library of information.
Enhancing the site design
pixelslam incorporated a series of new designs such as changing the text font to better match the Brewer logo and using parallax scrolling to emphasize the vertical movement of the equipment. New images emphasized the products and more aspirational imagery focused on members of the climbing community.
The redesign also included an extensive SEO enhancement effort to include keywords in the meta information on all pages and targeting words people would be searching for such as “climbing wall” or “climbing training.”
The Brewer equipment enables climbers to strive for and reach the top of the mountain. The pixelslam website redesign now makes it a worthy match for such lofty aspirations.