Pentablock USA, A WP Website
Problem:
As the new North American branch and company, Pentablock USA needed to set themselves apart from their home country of Australia. The initial (WordPress) website was an exact replica of the Aussie website, having the .com and contact page being the only differences. Pentablock USA’s website didn’t give them an identity. It didn’t speak to the U.S. consumers nor fully describe what makes Pentablock’s products so unique and revolutionary. See original website below.
Solution:
At Kowaala, we set out to create a website that stood out from competitors and Pentablock Australia. A website that gave a “visual” to the viewer, allowing them to fully understand Pentablock’s game changing concept.
Immediately, we knew videos would do the trick! Pentablock loved the idea and made a few calls with a close friend and videographer to get started on a video loop for the homepage banner. Luckily, we have a teammate, Rohan, to help create a captivating animated video. What’s an animated video? It’s a 90 second animated commercial. For this project, we identified the problem in the veneer block industry, how Pentablock has solved it, and how easy it is to use. The video came out wonderfully. Check it out below:
Everyone Pentablock and Kowaala was absolutely blown away by the videos put together. We couldn’t have done it without everyone’s involvement. From Pentablock’s guidance and details to Kowaala’s discovery sessions to get all of the finer details and information to create a simple, captivating story.
As with any website project at Kowaala, we completed our discovery session, gathered content, and analyzed the competitors before paper sketching. We defined their color palette and typography to create a style guide. We every digital design, we uploaded/synced the designs with InvisonApp (a prototyping tool) so everyone could review, add comments and make revision requests before approving the final designs.
Through multiple iterations on paper then digital, we finally came to a design which gave that visual we were all wanting because Pentablocks are revolutionary. You can see it in the videos and absolutely believe it!
Now, Pentablock has a website that showcases their products, examples of projects, where to buy locations, installation guides, how to become an installer, how to videos, and streaming social media feed all to inspire viewers to be DIYers, learn more and purchase Pentablocks locally.
This project was no easy feat. We had a very short, stressful and constrained time-frame of 2 months, but we pulled it off and ended 2017 with a bang! The website was designed from scratch, meaning no WordPress template or theme was used, making it truly one of a kind.
Optimization:
Once the project and new year settled down in early 2018, we came back around to optimizing the website. Some of the plugins, such as Juicier social media feed, put quite a bit of drag on pagespeed. We optimized the website based on Pingdom and GTMetrix and compressed videos and images to increase page load time and decreased website size so it wasn’t as “heavy”. See images below.
