Life Cycle Engineering
Designer: LCE Marketing
Life Cycle Engineering provides engineering solutions for private industry, public entities, government organizations, and the military. The LCE.com website integrates deeply into LCE's marketing efforts, offering over a thousand pages of content and resources. LCE uses gated resources, such as whitepaper downloads and assessment tools, to generate leads and build their mailing lists.
The Challenge
LCE's previous website, launched in 2008, transformed their marketing efforts. It generated leads using a combination of organic search results and PPC advertising. The existing search engine success made it imperative to preserve search engine raking and discoverability during a reorganization; and the volume of the content would make it difficult to reorganize while coalescing input from multiple departments within LCE.
Solution
metatation designed a map of the structure of the site by loading all existing content into a custom-built Content Management System (CMS). The LCE marketing department needed us to provide development support while they worked with their internal departments to develop a new structure. By using the CMS we created an interactive process to reorganize the site. This allowed us to wireframe the content in real time, providing feedback internally while structural decisions were made.
In parallel with the structural design process, metatation created the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the visual design. The in-house LCE designer was able to make real-world design decisions using live content. As a result the design was fluid throughout the project, and could be updated in real time as we made changes.
We preserved search engine raking and content discoverability by working with the original content in the CMS. The CMS tracked changes as sections were reorganized, pages were moved, and URLs were replaced. The result was a completely redesigned and restructured website that maintained its position in the search results and kept an uninterrupted flow of traffic.