Delivering Competitive Edge with an Innovative Website Overhaul

Optimizely CMS for Best-in-Class Digital Experience

By building the new website on the Optimizely framework, Thermon reduced the risk of accruing technology debt and decreased their total cost of ownership (TCO). Thermon’s website is kept updated with continuous Optimizely security releases and regular deployments of multi-tenant services ensure the product is always the newest on the market. Optimizely’s CMS was selected for its best-in-class tools that are needed to quickly and easily create visually stunning pages and experiences. The tool provides actionable insights and analytics that automatically capture visitor data to deliver a complete overview of user behavior. Omnichannel tracking is available for a holistic view of personal preferences and campaign engagement on every visitor to Thermon’s website from multiple channels.

Guidance built Thermon’s website framework on Optimizely’s Content Cloud CMS to enable easy authoring with drag and drop functionality, content blocks and easy image upload to quickly create new pages and add new content. The new website allows editing and previewing across all devices and fully supports responsive and adaptive design. In addition, during the replatform, Guidance produced a website that carries visual design best practices and delivers an intuitive usability approach with thorough search functionality.

Powerful Search For Intuitive Design

Thermon’s website is an invaluable resource for the process heating industry; it provides product specification sheets, in-field calculation/design tools (Computrace) and an abundance of educational literature and media. The Computrace tool allows users to build plant designs in 3D and thereby calculate the amount of thermal transfer cables required for the full project.

In order to find all this valuable information, Guidance implemented advanced search capabilities for Thermon’s website users. An extensive and easy-to-use category tree and product search helps customers find exactly what they’re looking for in a quick and efficient process. The full site map is now indexable by Google and encourages better search engine optimization (SEO). The full-text search functionality enables powerful word and phrase matching and the search tool is optimized for high volume search traffic.

Customized User Experience Journey

Thermon’s new website is a huge shift for the company. Previously, the company operated entirely on printed catalogs and this website represents an entirely digital catalog. Guidance ensured that the digital catalog is easily absorbed by the reader by incorporating many design and UX/UI strategies. Not only did Guidance update the overall user experience, the newly digitized catalog now serves as a lead generation tool for their sales representatives and lays the groundwork for Thermon’s future ecommerce endeavors.

There are an impressive number of assets to describe products including a Quick View button on product image rollover. In addition to the product’s details, Quick View on image rollover, the product description page includes downloadable PDFs with product information. The website now contains image asset guideline documentation. From the product description page and throughout the user’s journey, customers can directly “Request a Quote” to contact a live sales representative for further information.

All the product information is provided in a highly digestible UX with parallax scrolling capabilities and the 360 degree view of the products helps customers narrow down their product selection. The website truly serves as a central repository for all category and product data. Guidance delivered a website with a modern, fresh look; full bleed imagery and sans serif type keep the users motivated to further navigate through each product. Previously overly text-heavy pages have been transformed into fluid pages of content designed to capture the eye and imagination of the reader.

To receive on-going information, customers can choose to “Stay Informed” at any stage of their user journey. Due to the complexity and nature of Thermon’s products, their rich product documentation is an essential and well-loved part of the process heating community. Guidance helped Thermon integrate the new Optimizely platform with their ERP and CRM tools. Customers are assigned sales representatives to further customize the customer experience at every stage.

Thermon’s new website instantly recognizes the visitor’s country location and displays content in their respective language (when available). As over fifty languages and countries are supported, this international website truly represents a global company. Guidance has helped Thermon elevate their brand presence and empower the company to continue selling and distributing their products and services through an essential new channel.