My primary task at Precision Scale & Balance was to improve their use of technology and let it drive in more business. The primary method of doing this was to improve the website, but a different web host and a better search engine strategy proved useful also.
The website was completely rewritten. Initially, it was semi-catalog website written in static HTML, which was obviously never updated because one would have to delve into the HTML itself to modify the catalog. This was remedied by moving to PHP to allow the catalog items to be stored in a database that could be updated easily using the administrative interface that I wrote. Prewritten catalog packages were evaluated, but because all of the items could be ordered from the manufacturers and most of the manufacturers provided their catalog in electronic form, the decision was made to design the database and website from scratch. This proved to be the easy part compared to massaging the data from the manufacturers into something that could be imported.
A shopping cart that allowed customers to purchase items was created using the APIs that PayPal provides. This was done to avoid the messiness of storing credit card data or dealing with a merchant account.
Moving to a new web host allowed us to use PHP and mySQL to create the website, but also to give us more power over our email system to make it work for us instead of being the hindrance it started out as. Spam was controlled and email accounts were standardized across the company’s multiple locations.
Once again, I was charged with improving the search engine performance of the website, something I’m not an expert at, by far. This time, I utilized paid advertising to try to drive in traffic. This actually had a beneficial effect and led to a number of completed sales while I was still with the company.
Here are before and after pictures of their main website.
