At the time, Alex was at the start of the process of relaunching their website, and now the new site is live I caught up with him to find out about the changes that have been made.

Tell us about your company, ICON Printing, and what your day-to-day job entails

ICON Printing produce custom clothing, including but not limited to, printed t-shirts and bags for forward thinking brands and agencies; anything from merchandise to promotional clothing for events or staff uniform. Our clients include Red Bull, Nike, Harvey Nicols and Brew Dog.

I’m the founder so my day to day job is quite varied. Recently my time has been spent managing the new website build, meeting key customer accounts, liaising with the digital marketing agency we work with and planning for the next few months’ marketing activities.

I oversee our digital marketing, and work with freelance editors to help produce our content and external agencies to help guide our SEO, PR and PPC strategies.

You’ve just relaunched your website – what were the drawbacks of the old design and was this the first iteration of the ICON Printing website?

It’s now the second iteration of the site. The main issues with the old site were:

  • The catalogue featured stock product images supplied by the garment brands (i.e. American Apparel) which made it hard for users to differentiate between the fit and cut of the different brands and products.
  • The online quote system was limited to the user requiring just one design, whereas we found that over 30% of orders were for multiple designs (we now cater for multiple designs thanks to our instant quote system).
  • There was no customer account / login section
  • Limited content presentation and layout

Have you built the new site in-house or worked with agencies? Why did you go down that route?

We wanted the best possible results from the re-launch and to do this thought it was important to work with experts in each field; so, we worked with external design, web development and SEO agencies to build the site.

The majority of our business comes from referrals and online search traffic and we plan to grow by increasing our search visibility, so on-site optimisation has been key.

What are the main goals of the new site?

T-shirt printing and customised clothing are a bit of an artform and the results can vary depending on the production method, artwork format and garment type.

We don’t expect our customers to know the ins and outs of printing – that’s our job – but we wanted to make the site as informative as possible in order to educate visitors about the pros and cons of each print method.

We’ve added lots more content, photos and videos to better inform users of the different production methods available and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

We also spent a lot of time on the product catalogue. We cherry picked our favourite products, which offer the best quality and value for money, and photographed them all on the same models, so now it’s easy to compare the different cut and fit of the garments like for like.

No one else in the industry has done this.

Finally, we’ve introduced the instant quote system, to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get an instant quote online rather than having to wait for an email response.

Have you optimised for different devices and screen sizes?

Not initially, but the site is built on a responsive framework and we plan to optimise for different devices and screen sizes in the near future.

What kind of user testing and optimisation processes have you done on the new site?

We interviewed current customers and others who weren’t familiar with our company, to understand more about the site’s usability.

Additionally, we carried out some task analyses during which we identified specific tasks and asked users to go through the process they would use to complete the task. We also set up a number of tests using UsabilityHub.

Have you seen an impact so far on search rankings and conversion rates?

The new site was only launched a month ago so it’s still early days but early analysis shows the site rankings have been maintained.

Perhaps we’ll catch up with Alex in a few months to see if the changes have had the positive impact expected…