Towmate Trailers: Website & 3D Models
We were approached by ATE, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of trailer parts, as they required a new online presence for Towmate Trailers, their trailer design and manufacturing division. The ATE brand is primarily known for trailer parts and the fact that they also make trailers under the Towmate banner was largely going unnoticed on the existing ATE site.
The Design Brief
The ATE trailer parts site is also an e-commerce site so our brief was to extract the somewhat buried Towmate content and migrate it to a new, standalone, brochure-style WordPress site with its own distinct visual identity.
Technical SEO Audit & Content Optimisation
As always, we started with a thorough SEO audit to ensure the migrated content (including relevant news, blogs and guides) would be handled correctly in the eyes of Google and no harm would be done to domain authority or search rankings.
We also looked for opportunities to optimise the existing content and make further improvements with the structure and content of the new website, including an FAQs page, interactive UK dealer map, one-click dealer locator and more information about industries served, Towmate’s custom-made trailer offering and rigorous testing procedures.
With a new sitemap and on-page content structure agreed, we began designing the site for desktop and mobile. The brief called for a highly visual design treatment with full-width imagery and video and a fairly minimalist approach to written content.
We inherited the Towmate brand identity so already had a logo and colour palette to work with, but we wanted to make sure this site would complement the ATE site while having its own “personality”. We introduced a new accent colour – orange – to help with this.
360° Product Viewer & 3D Models
The client also wanted to incorporate a 360° product viewer for each trailer range so we set our 3D animator to work creating 7 photorealistic trailer models using the CAD drawings.
Product Configurator Tool
We also developed a comprehensive product configurator tool which would allow users to select the base model plus any optional equipment they might require then send that information directly to the Towmate sales team to follow up and complete the purchase.
Improving the User Experience
As well as subtle UX embellishments and the introduction of a more compelling brand narrative (via a people-focused ‘About’ page, case studies and testimonials), the biggest improvement we made from a user experience perspective was to condense 120+ highly-repetitive trailer pages into 4 core range pages for Rhino, Ram, Raptor and Osprey with all the different models within each range selectable via a dynamic, intuitive user interface.
