Call it a Boat Launch: efelle Teams Up with PW Brands to Design and Develop Two Watersport eCommerce Websites

Surf’s Up! efelle Launches a Duo of Watersport Company Websites to Help You Beat the Summer Heat

efelle creative recently partnered with Laguna Hills-based PW Brands to design and develop custom themes for two of the company’s online stores: Aerial Wakeboarding and Stryker T-Tops.

Together, the two PW Brands are leaders in custom design, development and manufacturing services in the marine industry, offering T-Tops, wakeboard tower and accessory products to a wide audience in the United States and abroad.

When PW Brands decided to transition from their previous ecommerce database over to the BigCommerce platform, they sought out a web design agency capable of delivering the unique functionality they were looking for while arming their websites with the flexibility to easily manage their content. As BigCommerce Elite Partners with an award-winning design and development team, efelle creative was a natural fit.  

Double the eCommerce Sites, Double the Fun

Aerial Wakeboarding

The Aerial Wakeboarding brand took the wakeboard boat products market by storm with its flagship product, the Airborne tower, which was soon followed by the Ascent and Assault towers. The Aerial Wakeboarding brand’s commitment to design and quality culminated in the release of the Aerial FreeRide Tower, the first-of-its-kind “forward swept” universal tower design with the highest tow point available.

Stryker T-Tops

Stryker T-tops offers new marine accessories for the fishermen of the world, including a folding canopy featuring Sunbrella fabric. Throughout the years, Stryker has continued to add a variety of aftermarket products to their selection, including LED light bars, leaning posts, rod holders, electronics box, outrigger holders, and more.

Design and Development Opportunities and Successes

Both website redesigns focused on improving User Experience (UX), streamlining site architecture, and building mobile responsivity into every page. We set up and configured our proprietary content management system, FusionCMS, for non-eCommerce components of the sites, allowing us to provide each website with a single build while still taking advantage of BigCommerce’s powerful platform to manage and market their products. Highlights of these dual Fusion and BigCommerce builds include the searchable and filterable customer review photo galleries and powerful yet easy-to-use website management and marketing tools.

The development of product pages were given specific attention to flexibility, with elements in nearly every section easy to manage and swap around in BigCommerce, making it quick and simple for the client’s team to keep up with package promotions, product options, and new releases.

The product page designs offer easy-to-access, at-a-glance views of product information and options for checkout. On the catalog page, product filters create an optimal user experience—the ability to not only search all products, but also easily filter by product category, price, and brand is all available on the left side of all product pages so users can easily find exactly what they’re looking for.

Our team wanted to make sure that marketing and promotional upkeep for the sites was a cinch. We built both sites so banners, featured products, and call-to-action sections on the homepages are easy to swap out with just a few clicks in the CMS. This allows each website to feature large and compelling imagery as new offers and seasonal priorities change throughout the year.

Making Waves with our SEO-Forward Approach

One main focus of the redesign effort centered around preserving and extending SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value. Each store has an optimized BigCommerce custom Stencil theme with subpages to match, allowing us to create the sites with their own unique SEO-friendly design elements.

These elements include custom photo galleries featuring customer-submitted photos of the tower and t-top products on a variety of boat models and manufacturers. Not only do the galleries offer a handy resource to shoppers looking for a visual representation of how one of their products might look installed on a boat, they provide robust SEO benefits to each of the websites.

We also implemented simple gallery navigation that allows users to sort by tower model and boat manufacturer or to search by a specific keyword.

In addition to the SEO best practices we implement with all our website builds, we added a few special features to Stryker and Aerial for even more SEO benefits, including the following:

• Schema micro-data on breadcrumbs, articles and reviews for rich search card display.

• Vue Social Share to easily share pages—such as gallery reviews—across popular social media platforms.

• Social media extendable areas for setting unique OG tags for full social media share data.

• Image-search-index-friendly lazy loading.

While lazy loading is great for pagespeed, it also introduces other issues when it comes to search index of images: Google will load the Javascript on a page before indexing it, but it will not necessarily scroll down the whole page or click around to bring all slider images into view (which would normally trigger lazy loading to switch out a filler image to the final image).

Put bluntly? This means that lots of images might not get properly indexed.

Our solution involved setting up the lazy loading image system a bit differently. Rather than a single, blank filler image on page load, we set a small low-resolution version of the final image. This low-res version loads quickly, is indexed properly, and will have a "blur" filter on it to distort it's low-quality nature. When the image is scrolled to and the final image is lazy loaded in, the blur is removed to reveal the final image.

Looking for a Custom New Website for Your eCommerce Business That’s as Easy to Manage as It Is Stunning to Look At?

Our team at efelle Creative understands the importance of putting your best brand forward in a constantly evolving digital space. Reach out today to find out how we can design and create your next eCommerce website with an SEO-first approach in mind. Call us at 206.384.4909 or use our online contact form for a free consultation.