Case Study

If you know even a little about marketing, you know websites can be one of the most complicated aspects of your marketing strategy. As the face of your brand, consumers visit your site to learn about your products and services, make purchases or communicate with you directly. But, a successful execution takes careful planning and ongoing maintenance.  

With a company like Life Fitness, which has both D2C & B2B components and is known as one of the world's largest fitness brands, its website needs consistent updates and edits based on its global and regional goals. However, their old site’s content management system (CMS) made even the smallest edits confusing and frustrating. 

Through our recent partnership, thunder::tech helped redesign the Life Fitness website and implement a new CMS that makes managing and updating the site a stress-free experience for their whole team.   

The goal 

We’re a collaborative bunch here at thunder::tech, which means we’re never working in a silo. Not only do our teams work together across departments, we consider our clients part of the t::team and work closely with them throughout every stage of the process.  This redesign was no different; in collaboration with our incredible UX, Creative and Development teams, Life Fitness and thunder::tech focused on specific tactical targets that would support their transformation: 

• Global implementation 
• Simplify website updates and maintenance  
• Update sales support 
• Include advanced website optimizations  

 

Behind the scenes  

As with any redesign, we like to start with UX research; this helps ground our work in our client's overall goals, best practices and user experience.  Through this research, we created an overall UX strategy to inform the sitemap and style boards presented to the Life Fitness team. 

Once we got the green light, we started building comprehensive mockups and involved our Front-end Development team. In addition to the overall redesign and development effort, our team was able to leverage our innovative automated content scraping tool that helps migrate legacy content from existing sites and port it to structured areas within a new platform.  This tool alone helped accelerate the timeline and reduce the overall manpower (and costs) needed to reliably migrate the thousands of pages of content, images and links.   

The outcome 

Obviously, accomplishing project goals is always a priority for anything we sign onto. However, with a project as big as this one, delivering a fully redesigned global site with new SEO strategies, user research-driven UX creative and product strategies all within a 10-month time frame was no small feat. But we delivered!   

Successful Content Migration  

Now, this isn't just any website. We're talking about a site accessible in over 15 regions, available in 16 different languages and holding more than 20,000 pages of content spread across more than 60 types of pages. The cool part? Thanks to the low-code, design-friendly model, minor edits to SEO like metadata, URL structure, header tags etc., in addition to regular updates to product-related information, can be made by over 40 CMS users whenever needed.  

And without getting too deep into the technical, we made managing the backend smoother by breaking access into three custom roles. This helps limit opportunities for error as it means only a select few can make significant site-wide changes. It's all about keeping things neat and tidy, right? 

Advanced Web Development Techniques 

We also set up the ability to utilize URL redirects, integrate with third-party data analytics platforms for tracking web performance and enable A/B testing for various components like pages and images. This way, the Life Fitness team could dial in on what works best for the site and its visitors. 

To help improve sales support, we incorporated a Live Chat function and created custom forms on each page directed to the appropriate salesperson. Additionally, we redesigned their existing product pages to be more sales-oriented assets to boost DTC and future B2B e-commerce.  

But we didn’t stop there! We also delivered five multi-step content flows and over 20 unique templates that offer a whole spectrum of page builder features. All to help empower the Life Fitness team to add new pages and make significant updates on their own. There's no need for an expert developer whenever they want to tweak something - though, of course, we're always on standby to lend a hand if needed.  

 

Web design is a multi-layered process and takes careful thought to build something successful. Whether you’re looking to redesign a website as massive as Life Fitness or have something a little smaller you’d like help with, our Website Design and Development team is ready to help! Let’s chat!