DutchCrafters Homepage & Header Design

The Challenge

Dutchcrafters.com was in a bad place in Search rankings, at times being listed as low as 36th for our primary search term, "Amish Furniture." This meant we were missing out on thousands of visitors a day and millions of dollars in revenue. Even worse, we had issues with our webpage hierarchy and the user experience. As an increasing number of shoppers used mobile devices to visit our website, our mobile header design offered a confusing and unusual layout.

The Process

I was asked to work with a small group to identify a new homepage design that would improve our Search Engine Optimization and a revised header to better direct customers to our most critical pages.

Results

Working with developers and a marketing team, I designed the new DutchCrafters home page, with an eye on making it both engaging for visitors and optimized for search engines. My favorite part of the redesign was the chance to impact the User Experience. By clarifying a few direct goals for the page, we were able to build the page from the ground up. The major change was the realization that we needed to make it easy for our customer to do what they came to our site to do: shop for furniture. As a result of that, we decided to add large buttons linking to our Category Pages near the top of the home page, in prime real estate on the page. The result? An increase in engagement, decrease in exit rate, and improved conversion rate among visitors to the updated homepage. As of 2022, the website is appearing as a top-3 result in Google's search rankings.

We edited the Header in the same process, simplifying the navigation and optimizing the experience on mobile devices. After a few months of A/B testing, we discovered that further revisions were necessary. Another round of design revisions led us to the design shown here, which has proven to be far more effective than either of the previous ones.