QubicaAMF Portal

QubicaAMF Worldwide is the global leader in bowling products, with sales offices all over the world. Their products include scoring systems, bowling center management software, lanes, maintenance products, bowling pins, furniture and the world’s first and only Bowler Entertainment System.

A business-centered company must have an effective and modern online communication strategy. In that respect, the QubicaAMF's old website needed an overhaul.

The redesign phase

A simple website renovation would not suffice: a complete redesign of the web portal was required.

Federica Gozza, marketing manager at QubicaAMF, pointed out the key objectives of the redesign: easier content updating, improved navigation for the various visitor personas, enhanced search engine optimization (SEO), greater clarity and effectiveness of “calls to action”, upgraded landing page management logic, mobile/responsive support, and a system for managing the international Bowling World Cup event that QubicaAMF has organized since 1965.

One key objective of the new website is conveying the notion that QubicaAMF is a capable solutions provider, that we are innovative, unique in our field, reliable and an excellent partner in the entertainment business.

QubicaAMF's new website had to reflect its strong business-to-business (B2B) focus.

To meet this challenge, QubicaAMF's team was composed of people from both IT and communications & marketing departments. RedTurtle brought to the table a team highly skilled and experienced professionals in several disciplines: UX design, web marketing/SEO, and web solutions development. RedTurtle also engaged its reliable and successful partners: NiEW for UX design and GT Idea for SEO/web marketing.

The first part of the project consisted of understanding the domain, the business and the service model, identifying the target audiences and the relevant personas for each service delivered by the new portal.

Three personas were identified:

1. Those who want to invest in bowling
2. Those who have to modernize their bowling center or their place/structure for entertainment
3. Those who wish to improve the management of their bowling center

The next step was to map the existing content and evaluate it from the communication point of view.

The competitive analysis was broadened beyond the borders of the site of QubicaAMF to include its main competitors in this evaluation process.

RedTurtle delivered surfable wireframes, allowing users belonging in the different personas to carry out navigation tests on the website. The wireframe-based tests led to several iterations of design proposals.

The making of the site

After this initial project phase, which strongly involved the marketing management in Italy and in the USA, the next phase was system implementation.

RedTurtle chose to deploy the latest version of its favorite CMS, Plone 5.

The development of special editing tools was required, to allow the marketing dept. of QubicaAMF to act independently on the different areas of the site, including the home page, products, investor relations,  testimonials, regional offices, and contact management.

An important system requirement was ease of use by editorial staff, with features to allow content reuse across the site, particularly of images.

Another challenge was implementing ways to manage worldwide branch office and distributor information, including contact information, supporting a customer base spread out over 90 countries. Those data are fundamental to QubicaAMF's back-office effectiveness.

The delivered website had to provide superior ease of updating content while maintaining data consistency.

During system implementation, we used a method of incremental development with continuous partial releases, allowing editorial staff to gradually extend their work to the various sections of the site as soon as each section was available.

This agile approach proved effective and allowed the editorial staff, with the support of Ricreativi, the design agency, to develop new multimedia materials in parallel.

RedTurtle executed simultaneously on the SEO component of the project, using Google Analytics to understand traffic patterns on the previous website, to prepare redirects needed for the new site launch, a fundamental step when you update a site's structure so comprehensively to avoid losing traffic and  acquired search results ranking.

The SEO work included the optimization of the HTML code, using schema.org markup and particular care in the selection of content titles and URLs.

Next steps

Now that the new website has launched, RedTurtle is now focused on the metrics: monitoring the SEO improvements and identifying possible “tuning” of the SEO strategy. RedTurtle is also investigating ways of integrating the landing pages with QubicaAMF's marketing tools and CRM system.

Another next step will be the remake of the customer portal providing technical materials and supporting a new integrated customer management and e-commerce system.