Gone were the days when a website only served as a footnote in a company’s organizational strategy. Today, digital presence is already an imperative since a website can function as the greeter, sales outlet, and customer support all at the same time. It is capable of reaching a greater number of people, multiplying your business’ conversions in the process. These factors underpinned the website redesign project we completed for Avenue Gastrobar.
A website allows your brand, your product, and your message to reach your target market anytime, anywhere. To take advantage of this opportunity, the Avenue Gastrobar website redesign project focused on four core aspects: Visual Design, User Experience, Content, and Synergy. All these worked to guarantee that the new digital destination is usable and searchable while providing a tool that is appealing, accurate and convenient.
PROCESS
In terms of visual design, my solution was a radical departure from Avenue’s old website, which has a generic and uninspired appearance. We have integrated new visual elements such as custom videos and striking graphics to recreate a kind of experience that we want users to expect from the bar. We want to immediately appeal to the senses from the get go. We then endeavored to sustain this interest throughout the site’s inside pages by making sure that the combination of images, videos and texts create dynamism and energy.
The user experience (UX) was essentially concerned with the logical progression of user interaction with the website towards sales conversion. We facilitated this by working to ensure a high level of seamlessness, which was driven by simplified user interface (UI), streamlined and optimized web contents, and systematic website structure. We have chosen to install WordPress, taking advantage of its powerful tools, and tailoring them according to the needs of the project.
Finally, there is the case of synergy. I made sure that the website is tightly integrated with Avenue Gastrobar’s brick-and-mortar business. For example, we made sure that publishing key information such as the menus were dynamic, addressing the fluidity of the bar’s daily operation. There are also key web elements that are integrated with the company’s social media accounts so that newly published press materials or menu changes can easily be shared in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
MANAGEMENT
Now, content is considered one of the most crucial elements in website development. It provides information, sense, and direction that reassure users with respect to the issue of legitimacy and reliability. For the new Avenue website, content was promptly deployed according to this consideration. More importantly, however, the project benefited from our expertise in SEO, directory listing, and reputation management. Aside from the quality, contents were also optimized so that they get indexed by search engines successfully and picked up by relevant networks to ensure that the message reach a broader audience swiftly.
PROJECT RESULTS
After the relaunch of Avenue Gastrobar’s website, we tracked its progress for several months and we found three remarkable developments. First, there is the case of bounce rate, which refers to the percentage of users entering and leaving without viewing other pages. It was reduced by 42 percent. Mobile page views also increased by 37 percent and this area is critical for Avenue because the web analytics revealed portable device users claim the lion share of user views and conversions by platform. Indeed, when we took a look at the reservation conversion rate, our client was surprised to learn that it improved by an astounding 116 percent. The website is also successfully indexed at Google, promptly showing as the top one search result for gastrobars in the Orlando area.
