Case Study: Website refresh helps arboricultural firm branch out into new sectors

Company overview

Founded in 2015, Gimbles Tree Works is a successful arboricultural firm, supplying tree surgery and related services to residential and commercial clients. Since it’s inception, Gimbles has grown rapidly and invested in equipment appropriate to support larger-scale, commercial contracts, as well as ensuring they are meeting and exceeding requirements expected of them from a risk and compliance perspective.

The challenge

To reflect their growth as a business, and to balance the ratio of residential and commercial clients, Gimbles Tree Works was seeking an expert partner to advise, recommend and implement improvements and enhancements to their website. A review of competitor sites showed that Gimbles was already on the front-foot (responsive, mobile first, simple to support - WordPress-based). However Gimbles felt that the user experience could be improved; there was also a desire to establish a platform on which longer-term enhancements could be added as the business continues to grow, such as ‘live chat’, blogging, video content etc.

Gimbles had three main objectives they wanted to achieve as part of this work:

Enhance the aesthetics to the existing website
- To improve the ‘look and feel’ and to reflect the professionalism and capabilities of Gimbles Tree Works
- Demonstrate to commercial visitors GTW’s professional credentials
Improve functionality, performance and security
- There was a perception that the website had become sluggish and as such, wasn’t performing optimally
- Fix broken links and improve usability of social media features
- Improve site security by implementing HTTPS (SSL certificate)
Exhibit credibility and quality of Gimbles work
- Bring customer testimonials and logos up to date
- Integrate social feeds into website

Our solution

Following a collaborative review of the website, and inline with Gimbles objectives outlined above, a number of areas were suggested, agreed and implemented. These included:

Aesthetics
- Variations of the Gimbles logo were created depending on the use case e.g. a white version that provides more contrast against darker backgrounds; a favicon (the small icon seen on each tab of the web browser) Redesigned home page, including inclusion of a new video banner; re-designed footer; re-balancing of focus on service offerings
- Improved layout of content across other pages; additional widgets to better showcase Gimbles capabilities

New Gimbles Tree Works footer layout — New and improved, cleaner footer layout

Functionality, performance and security
- Fixed all broken links, menus, missing images and page titles
- Compressed and optimised image sizes to improve page loading times
- SSL certificate was implemented using the excellent free service ‘Let’s Encrypt’. To avoid duplicate content, and therefore to preserve search engine optimisation (SEO), re-directs were setup. Updates were also made to Google Search Console, Google Analytics and AdWords
Credibility and quality
- Improvements to social media sharing functionality
- Implemented certification and accreditation logo carousel

Gimbles Tree Works Accreditation Logos CHAS CSCS NPTC — New accreditation logo section

A further area for the project was an initial assessment of Gimbles AdWords account to make initial recommendations for improvement there. A case study on this activity will be added soon.

The results

Increased performance significantly - reduced page size from 65Mb to 2.5Mb
- Pingdom test grade went from a C grade to an A 👍
Improved user and customer experience
Improved security, brand confidence and SEO rankings through SSL implementation
Since the website was updated, Gimbles has successfully won contracts for several commercial clients across the public- and private-sector

Drag the slide above to see the before and after optimisation performance results of the portfolio page

What our client says

“I would high recommend Atomicity - they respond quickly and their innovative approach means Atomicity find an individual angle to help your company stand out from the crowd.”

George Lineham, Founder, Gimbles Tree Works. March 2018

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