Cheadle Fabrications
I finally got around to building the website for my brother-in-law Graham's business Cheadle Fabrications after a year of other items getting in the way. It's been a fast, fun project and took about 4 hours to get it to the state it is in now. I had a template for the site since I recently worked with Jeff on another manufacturing site Glo-brite.com based in Chicago. Unlike Glo-brite, Cheadle Fabrications had no prior website and so I pulled the content and the images from their brochures. My family all live in England and since I knew there would be lags any other way I just charged ahead to get a version of the site up I would proud to own. The use of ColdFusion only serves to support the templating system right now but a future enhancement will involve hooking the static content panels up to my home-grown CMS "HAM" used in the Globrite site.
I built the site with the keywords and search engine traffic in mind, adding Google Analytics with funnels to track lead generation - the primary goal of the site. I'm running Google Adwords campaigns focussed on Europe initially to ensure the clickthroughs come from businesses most likely to contact Graham for work. Over the coming weeks I'll be reporting back about the process behind the adwords campaign and taking the Google website optimizer for a test drive with her content to see if there are more appealing landing pages to inspire visitors to submit requests through the contact form. A neat feature of AdWords I discovered yesterday is the smart assignment of candidate ad units. The tool gives you a simple process to try different versions of the content used in an ad to see which one drives the most clickthrus. If you elect to use the smart assignment feature it works like natural selection where the most successful (highest clickthru) ad unit is shown more frequently than those with low yield.
Cheadle Fabrications is a steel fabrications business based in the North-west of England specializing in supplying components to the fireplace industry like hotboxes and canopies but they also do custom metal shaping projects like supplying some regional schools with stainless steel urinals built from scratch.