Boulder, Colorado lightweight outdoor apparel and gear company GoLite came to us with a problem. They had a website (designed by another agency) that was failing to do the GoLite brand justice. GoLite's brand is agile, energetic, outdoorsy, youthful, healthy, innovative, light... a breath of crisp mountain air with a touch of pine scent. Their website, by contrast, was grey and drab, lacked consistency in photography and fonts, and broke many 'best practices' rules, from font colors that made text very hard to read to scrolling "ticker" text straight out of 1995-era websites.

When we took a look at the site, beyond the obvious design issues, we also noted that their homepage lacked any clear call to action to purchase product. In fact, of all of the navigation menus on the page, only one single navigation item pointed to "shopping."

Click here to view a screenshot of the old site, with some of the flaws noted.

GoLite (and, subsequently, we) had another problem - their spring line of products was to launch just 6 weeks later.

We were to do a spring "refresh" update to the website, not touching the architecture of the site, but making vast improvements through a reskin of the visual interface where we were able to do it.

We received the official "go ahead" on the project on a Wednesday, and the next day we scheduled a call to review the new website design creative for Friday morning. That's right - just 2 days later.

Our creative strategy was two-fold:

To bring product to the forefront on the homepage, changing the main navigation items to a shopping experience, consolidating the company and brand information to one "about us" tab, creating a compelling photography-rich flash piece, and adding graphic drivers for featured products to the bottom of the page. The graphic drivers rotate and can provide analytics to inform GoLite about the popularity of product types, etc.

To show the products in their appropriate context, conveying the GoLite brand accurately as an innovative, modern brand, by leveraging aspirational photography and modern fonts.

In just 5 weeks' time beginning to end, we completed the strategy, planning, creative, programming, and deployment to our test server for beta testing - on budget and on time.

There were obstacles all over the place that challenged our timeframe, from constant [necessary] product changes on the client side to server issues that required our programmers to work 24-hour shifts, deploying tests of the site at 4am. GoLite's marketing director commented that she'd "never seen an agency work so hard so fast."

AND THE RESULTS...
Website visitors are now introduced to a product-centric homepage upon arrival, the product itself is presented in an aspirational, compelling way, and the ease of navigating to product purchasing pages is night and day easier. Within three months of the launch of our reskin, visits to product pages within the shopping cart had more than tripled, and for some products, traffic growth increased by six hundred percent.

The case study above paints the picture of what an agile team of experts is able to do in a short amount of time. If you missed it on our homepage, click here to read Seth Godin's commentary on the advantage of "small."

We're small by design. We have no plans to grow to a massive group of employees. We have a tight team who will work hard and smart - around the clock at times if necessary - to deliver exceptional quality with a focus on the return on our client's investment.

Quick, dedicated, nimble, and exceptionally well executed. That's our modus operandi.

Brand/Client: GoLite
Location: Boulder, CO
Industry: Retail & Manufacturing
Scope: Website design reskin (no infrastructure)
Time Period: 5 Weeks

From The Client:

"If you are looking to drive revenue from your online investment or new project, BIMCOM is a must have. Their unique business approach made a strong ROI on our investment."

- Chris B., IT Manager
GoLite
Boulder, Colorado