Business Situation:

Wayne Dalton, a national retailer and international distributor of garage doors systems came to Imaginet looking to update their website design from traditional to modern using SharePoint. They also owned a separate mobile site that wasn’t regularly or easily updated, and a blog that wasn’t consistently branded.

To remain competitive, Wayne Dalton required a newly designed website with enhanced features for their dealer network. Of their 1,075 North America dealers and 44 International dealers, some had independent websites featuring the brand and products, but all dealers wanted a better web solution to be able to showcase products to customers through their distribution channels.

Wayne Dalton engaged Imaginet to design and develop a new public facing website, with dealer sub sites, using SharePoint 2013 software with their existing SharePoint infrastructure to manage content and site navigation.

Solution Story:

Imaginet worked in an iterative fashion to ensure the design, layout and functional navigation elements were met. Imaginet leveraged their existing high availability infrastructure and used the existing SharePoint 2013 Farm and infrastructure for this development project. This website development project encompassed the following components:

• Creation of design mock-ups and wire frames for a new responsive SharePoint website
• Custom solutions to meet design and content requirements
• An initial implementation and roll out schedule
• An initial set of risks, assumptions and constraints

User Experience Workshops were performed to gather requirements and to help define custom branding and styling, navigation experience, responsive design, wire frame designs, site taxonomy. The following steps were taken define each item.

• Performed an ‘Opportunities Workshop’ to define what is working well with the current intranet, and what needs improvement.
• Led a ‘Card Sorting Workshop’ to simplify navigation, and remove unnecessary pages and duplicates.
• Completed a ‘Wire-framing Workshop’ to define the layout and content for 4 main templates including top-level screen elements and the location of each element.
• Created a desktop, Tablet and mobile prototype from wire frames. The prototype assisted in gathering feedback and provided another layer of knowledge for developers.
• Performed collaborative online reviews with the client and team to go over feedback and changes.
• Created a mock-up of the homepage in three device sizes (mobile, tablet and desktop.)
• Developed a pattern library with applied styles to each widget used.

Once the prototype was approved, Imaginet’s SharePoint team developed, deployed and tested this custom responsive SharePoint website. A consistently branded blog, and a new ‘Find a Dealer’ feature were also completed.

Wayne Dalton’s Dealership Network conferred not long after the deployment and tested the ‘Find a Dealer’ feature. They were impressed that every dealer now has their own branded, mobile-ready webpage with an interactive Google map to make it easy for customers to locate and contact them, and to be able to direct link to showcase products.