Building a British platform for OWA
Ceiling specialist OWA initially appointed Harris as its PR and social media agency – but with a keen eye on developing its presence within the UK market, it quickly became clear that the business needed a UK-facing website.
Previously, all traffic was running through the company’s German site – where OWA is headquartered, but our knowledge of British trends and building regulations meant we could clearly see the advantage of a specific UK online base.
With budgets at the forefront of everyone’s minds, Harris collaborated closely with OWA’s UK team to ensure that we were able to deliver a website that matched the company’s ambition whilst still keeping to a sensible price structure. Our existing relationship and knowledge of the brand and its products gave us an advantage, allowing us to shorten the ‘discovery’ phase and, once scope was agreed, move swiftly to design and build. OWA supported this, by providing detailed briefs and objectives – including must-have items, and specifying desired page view scores.
In full view – and behind the scenes
As a first step in the design and build, our web team created a single ‘splash page’ which would be visible to any visitors while the real work took place behind the scenes. This first page proved invaluable in setting the tone for the design of the whole site, and we utilised the existing brand colours and guidelines from OWA’s German site to ensure continuity and brand recognition.
Once the splash page was live, Harris commenced work on the proposed designs for the main site including the homepage, products mega-menu, case studies, contact and – a necessity for OWA – the product filtering system, which was conceived of to make it simple for potential customers to fine-tune their search for the right ceiling solutions by being able to toggle different features or functions on and off. The team quickly secured approvals and moved to the next phase: building the site.
In order to enable the site to progress quickly, and to keep within budget, we prioritised building the product and case study pages so that OWA’s internal team could populate these sections while we progressed the rest of the build. Throughout the process, our web team collaborated with the PR and social media departments to keep them abreast of progress and made adjustments based on their feedback – such as including a specific page on sustainability to support a key element of the wider communications campaign.
Ceiling success
The finished product is a bespoke, feature-rich website delivered on a considered budget, with OWA now better able to serve their UK customers. Just a few weeks after launch the site was performing well in search engines and seeing impressive levels of traffic.
What’s more, thanks to some innovative features devised by our web team, the OWA site has lightning-fast page loads and an almost perfect Google Page Speed score. In particular, despite the hundreds of products contained within the mega menu, the load time remains very quick due to a clever work-around that allows the menu to display to a user while the products load in the background on-demand.
Harris is now in the process of developing the site further, with the addition of a news section – and the relationship with OWA goes from strength to strength.
Simon Humphrey, technical manager at OWA (UK) said: “The response from our UK customers has been remarkable since we launched the new UK-specific website.
“For architects, the case studies have opened their eyes to the breadth and capability of OWA in the ceiling soffit space. For specialist sub-contractors and main contractors, the credibility of OWA has been notably enhanced and project specific data is so much easier to download. For our distributors, the visibility of products and systems in stock, together with the ability to download data sheets with ease, has made OWA UK much more user friendly.
“Harris Creative’s team have been a joy to work with throughout the development of the site. They have created a site to match the brief, filters, and menu requirements, whilst ensuring our online presence complimented the global OWA site.”
