Children sitting at a low table stacking blocks
Fleetwood Furniture

Development-Informed Design Creates a Better Website Experience

Fleetwood Furniture creates research-inspired classroom furniture that increase student and teacher engagement, connection 
and well-being. RDG used the Drupal 8 CMS to design and develop a website to match their evolving brand and support their catalog of thousands of products. The website also allows their network of dealers access to track their current and past orders and access dealer-specific content.

Fleetwood Furniture Website

Services

Design
Drupal
Front-end Development
Back-end Development

Drupal 8

Project Brief

In the spring of 2018, Fleetwood Furniture approached Rapid Development Group with an aggressive assignment— to develop an entirely new web presence to replace the company's sparse and aging site, and to launch the new site within 5 weeks using a Fleetwood-supplied design. Furthermore, the new site needed to represent the company's full product portfolio of furniture collections for the classroom and enable dealers to view real-time order status for customers. The resulting site was a major leap forward for Fleetwood, but came at a time when Fleetwood's brand was in transition.

In 2020, Fleetwood updated their branding and made significant changes to their communications strategy. As a result, their website no longer matched the rest of their branded materials. Their products section was also organized in a way that the company had since outgrown, making it difficult for both end users and Fleetwood consultants to find products on the website.

For the 2020 iteration of the website, Fleetwood trusted Rapid Development Group with both the design and development of the new website. The primary goals of this project were to:

  1. Improve the overall website design to match the company's evolving brand and improve accessibility
  2. Create a new interactive product catalog organized by the company's new standards 
  3. Entice users to schedule a consultation by highlighting the company's dedication to research and innovation
  4. Improve the content administration experience, empowering the client to manage website content themselves
Fleetwood homepage before redesign
Fleetwood homepage after redesign

What We Did

We created a website design that was inspired by the colors, graphic elements, and typography used in the company's newly designed marketing materials, ensuring that the website would fit seamlessly with the rest of the brand. We also worked with Fleetwood to determine a strategy for designing and organizing their online product catalog. We wanted to make sure that their users would be able to easily find the product that they're looking for, whether they're searching directly by model number or browsing by product attributes. With thousands of model numbers and dozens of product attributes to search by, this was especially challenging.

Challenge

Outdated design

Solution

Custom theme to match updated brand

We combined common design elements from their printed marketing materials to design and develop a custom Drupal 8 theme. Colorful accents paired with warm photography introduced a friendliness that the previous design lacked. Landing pages match products with applications and the research that inspired them, showcasing Fleetwood's expertise and knowledge. We also included multiple ways to get in contact with Fleetwood, either by submitting a request online, or by reaching out by phone or email.
Challenge

Difficult to find specific products

Solution

Interactive product catalog

Along with the brand refresh, Fleetwood also overhauled the way their products are organized in their catalogs. We developed a Product Finder web application that allows users to search by model number or browse by product attributes like category, size, shape, and more. In addition to the filtering options, we also created a guided visual search. The guided search displays images of the different product facets, helping users visualize the differences between similar options.
Challenge

Limited file storage

Solution

Integration with third-party storage

Fleetwood has thousands of products, and each product has images, videos, documents, and other files attached to it. Storing that many files would require a large amount of storage, which can be expensive. Fleetwood was already using the third-party application Sharepoint to manage their files, so we created a custom integration for our new Product Finder that allows users to download product files directly from Sharepoint without ever having to leave the Fleetwood website.
Web page displaying icons of all table shapes
Web page displaying product teasers
Web page displaying product teasers
Web page displaying a single product

Ongoing maintenance

Along with the custom theme and Product Finder web application, we also built an extensive library of landing page elements and building blocks, allowing Fleetwood's web team to create and update the content on their website post launch. With every project, Rapid Development Group always aims to create solutions that empower our clients to maintain their websites without needing help from a developer.

Fleetwood website displayed on laptop, mobile phone, and tablet.
Rapid Development Group far exceeded my expectations when re-envisioning and reconstructing our website. They took Fleetwood’s website to an entirely new level and made that journey a complete pleasure. I especially appreciated all the little extras they helped us achieve along the way – improved product search functionality, new photo assets, and chatline experience. Everyone on the team is a top-notch professional while still being down-to-earth, customer-oriented, and personable. They are a go-forward partner for us.
Sally Swift
Marketing Director
Fleetwood Furniture

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