Carlisle Wide Plank Floors
Happy Cog’s clients are generally an extremely passionate lot. However, every once in a while, we work with an organization whose passion for their work surpasses our expectations in ways we never anticipated. When that client’s project team is also crazy smart, firmly understands the project’s goals, and places unwavering trust in the vendor’s recommendations, well, you find yourself in a dream situation.
Craftsmanship and Caring
Carlisle Wide Plank Floors produces wide plank flooring, as their name plainly indicates. That’s where the plainness ends. This isn’t the stuff you buy at The Home Depot. As Carlisle says best, it’s a true representation of traditional folk art, lovingly crafted and destined to become a treasured family heirloom.
From the time one of Carlisle’s rough-sawn boards arrives at their mill to the time it reaches one of their customers, it will have come under the demanding scrutiny of more than a half-dozen experts—sometimes many more than that, depending on how it is finished. And not only is their care and knowledge applied to the wood itself, it’s applied to each and every customer. You don’t buy planks online with Carlisle. You speak to a skilled professional, who seeks to understand everything about you—your lifestyle, the type of home you live in, and the kind of “look” you have in mind. Carlisle then focuses its efforts on building a beautiful, customized floor just for you.
The closer we looked into how Carlisle approaches the design of floors, the more we saw ourselves reflected.
Doing a brand justice
Carlisle came to Happy Cog with a site that was underperforming in many ways. It wasn’t effectively conveying their pedigree, how they differ from “run of the mill” (pun intended) flooring producers, or their commitment to sustainability. Perhaps most importantly, the site didn’t allow customers to efficiently browse flooring options and convey their preferences to Carlisle experts.
Tools to communicate
For the Carlisle redesign, we determined that the heart of the customer experience had to be ensuring that one could quickly filter through hundreds of floor options in an intuitive fashion. The customer also needed to be able to select and save their favorites. Using JavaScript, Happy Cog created an interactive browsing experience that enabled customers to sort flooring options based on color, style, and species. Then, they could save their favorites to a list that is referenced and discussed in realtime, during a highly personalized call with a Carlisle representative.
Customers can filter floors according to preference and save their favorites for review with a Carlisle professional
Publishing power
Towards the end of the redesign effort, Happy Cog and Carlisle professionals integrated the site templates into the proven ExpressionEngine publishing platform, and customized the back-end to support Carlisle’s unique publishing needs and workflow.
At Happy Cog, we always seek to provide our clients with the ability to maintain their own sites without needing to come back to us for assistance. A client who is self-sufficient saves tremendous time and money over the long haul.
Responsibilities
Information architecture, graphic design, user experience design, user interface design, CSS/XHTML template development, JavaScript development, CMS development and training. Launched 15 June 2009.