Member Showcase

Outline Brief

Wolseley approached Simple Thinking for a full service end-to-end solution for the redesign and build of their corporate website.

Wolseley plc is the world's largest specialist trade distributor of plumbing and heating products to professional contractors and a leading supplier of building materials.

Wolseley has around 77,000 employees operating in 28 countries. Wolseley is one of the UK’s largest companies with revenue of £17billion and listed is in the FTSE 100 index of listed companies.

There current website, created by an internal team, was underperforming and did not appeal to key stakeholders. The solution was slow to update with a cumbersome content management system and it did not meet best practice requirements for FTSE 100 Company. At the point of brief the site was raked 79/100 by 3rd party metrics agency.

Outline Work

Simple Thinking proposed a ground up rebuild starting with a thorough requirements gathering phase to establish the key business requirements and audience groups for the website.

With the results from the requirements gathering Simple Thinking presented these to the business and created user focused solution that included key user groups such as the 77,000 Wolseley employees, media, customers and supply chain to name but a few.

Simple Thinking then delivered a creative execution and full technical build implementing an enterprise level CMS and metrics package.

A robust technical architecture was specified and procured for Wolslsey moving the responsibility away from an overstretched internal IT team.

Throughout the project Simple Thinking overcame challenges such as limited resource within Wolseley and disparate key stakeholders throughout the business, both nationally and internationally, buy adhering to proven robust project management procedures and a close working relationship that guided Wolseley through the process.

Unique Features

The new site has enjoyed success and significant ROI with the 3rd party metrics company rating the site 17/100, a gain of 62 places.

1. 679% Increase in visits from Jan 2006 to Jan 2008
2. Top 20 FTSE Site
3. Since the relaunch the site has never failed and has enjoyed 100% uptime
4. The site is 100% managed by the marketing team within Wolseley with no IT requirements since launch
5. Average visit length up from under 30 seconds to over 10 minutes

1 year on and the site is still performing with an 18% increase in visits in the 6 months from Aug 2007 to Jan 2008
During the Month of January, 2008:

1. A total of 100,180 distinct visits were made to the site.
2. The average visit lasted 10 Minutes and 30 Seconds.
3. 1,385 distinct web pages were viewed a total of 1,280,340 times.
4. The average visit contained 12.78 page views.