Milliken's Textiles
Challenge
Milliken has been in the textile industry for 150+ years and is one of the few US-based textile companies who has diversified and adapted to survive the trend of textile manufacturing going offshore. In 2017, Milliken’s two textile divisions, Performance Products and Specialty Fabrics, merged into one – Performance & Protective Textiles (PPT). The new PPT division faced a number of challenges in developing a new website. Their division website presence on Milliken’s corporate site was outdated and not comprehensive of their textile product offering. Additionally, there were 16 separate websites/microsites representing the division’s diverse array of product offerings. A main goal and challenge for the new PPT website was to bring all these sites together into one cohesive, streamlined web presence that would be easy to administer and update. Milliken PPT wanted a new site that would deliver a more cohesive brand, increase brand awareness, and offer their customers a better user experience where they could quickly and easily find product and company information from a central location.
Solution
Simplify a Complex Hierarchy Roger West constructed a new architecture bringing the 16 sites together in a streamlined way, while offering an intuitive hierarchy. Ultimately, we created parent pages, dubbed “market” pages. Each parent has several “solution” pages, which are children pages featuring specific, content-rich information, such as features/benefits, videos, photography, PDF downloads and other assets. Going a step deeper, these “solution” pages are linked to children pages of their own, called “product” pages. These product pages have even more product-specific information presented via tabs allowing the client to upload pertinent information like the care and keeping of the product or various spec sheets. Add Feature-Rich Functionality Additional content and features we added to Milliken PPT’s new site included: Site search customization and capabilities with a backend search crawler, so if users misspell a product or use related words, they will still receive relevant returns. Users can also easily share search results with the click of a button. A custom Google Map providing a centralized place displaying Milliken’s manufacturing locations, sales offices and corporate headquarters, as well as contact information. The coordination of a photoshoot at Milliken’s headquarters, enabled us to get fresh, vibrant photography of their people, facilities and most importantly, their textiles and products. Forward-looking personalization capabilities, as well as the back-end for robust resource center. Easily Manage a Wealth of Content The 16 existing websites for the division had been running on a variety of different content management systems, ranging from WordPress and SharePoint to outdated proprietary/legacy systems, which were all being administered and updated separately (if at all). Roger West brought all those sites together into Sitefinity, an enterprise-level CMS, to radically simplify site administration on the back end and improve user experience on the front end. The site also features several different shared content types, lists and resources that make managing content easier. Many different pages on the site rely on the same shared content, making it essential that the information can be managed from a central location.
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