When I joined TEC Equipment, their website had been redesigned just a year prior that took it from a very outdated look and layout (right), to a much more modern look and feel. However the new site still left a lot to be desired.

The new site was built on a very niche CMS that had a poor UI on the backend, and was very hard to do much more than add content to. Any changes beyond this required very expensive development work. It also had a number of problems from a functionality standpoint as well.

The biggest issue was the fact that ad-hoc inventory updates were very time consuming. The site was built without the ability to edit the individual trucks in the inventory. This was a problem when someone needed to make an update to a piece of inventory outside of the nightly refresh, as a number of processes needed to happen to run a new inventory update, and the entire inventory of up to 2,000 trucks and trailers needed to be refreshed, which could take over an hour.

The site also had a number of issues that hampered SEO, made navigation difficult, and made future development ideas impossible. I knew we needed something better very shortly into my tenure.

 

The Solution

After outlining the reasoning for this and getting approval to move forward, I outlined the key items we needed a new website to do:

  • Easier to update site inventory
  • Individually editable inventory pages