S3i: Stainless Steel Solutions

S3i are a manufacturer and distributor of stainless steel marine and architectural rigging.

A large proportion of S3i's business is concerned with bespoke rigging, architectural and artistic installations, and the engineering advice which accompanies those products. Recent projects include a lighting installation - known as the Helix - at the Royal Albert Hall, London.

But S3i also wanted to develop sales from a standard product catalogue; products such as wire rope, swage and swageless terminals, turnbuckles, tie bars, shackles, etc.

James Arrowsmith at S3i therefore had a demanding specification for a web site:

• The site had to be easy to navigate and use, despite an extensive catalogue
• The site had to be capable of open-ended expansion as his product catalogue grew
• The site had to be maintainable by his staff. He did not want to pay, and wait for, an IT specialist to implement requested changes
• The site had to attract traffic from search engines.
• The site had to enable customers to order online

Our online catalogue management tools enforce a strict heirarchy of product categories. This improves navigability of the site for the user, and also enables clear thinking by staff maintaining the catalogue. Furthermore, the heirarchy of product categories is open-ended, and capable of being restructured.

So S3i's demands for a website which was easy to navigate, and an online catalogue which would grow with the company, were met. For example: the wire rope product category was originally composed of six sub-categories: 1x19 Strand, 7x19 Rope, 7x7 Rope, PVC Coated 1x19 Strand, 1x7 Dyform, 1x19 Dyform.

The need for S3i's pages to rank highly in search engine results for key technical words and phrases is a common demand of businesses aiming to sell their products on line. Although some users will navigate to a business's site because of prior knowledge of the business, and although traditional advertising should not be overlooked, traffic from search engines is clearly important especially for its ability to bring in new customers. Generally speaking, a page will rank highly in search engine results if it is well structured, focused, detailed and has many links to and from the page.

Our administrative product encourages good writing techniques which will achieve high search engine rankings for pages within the online catalogue. The administrator is prompted to define each product category in terms of a number of attributes, including title, keywords, and heading which are crucial to recognition of the page by search engines.

Furthermore, the full heirarchy of product categories is easily navigable by search engines; for example, every page in the site has top level category links, sibling or child links, and a 'breadcrumb trial' of links enabling movement up through the heirarchy to more general categories. The home page offers a site map listing every page on the site. Thus, a search engine can begin to crawl the site on any page, and access any other page on the site. All of these navigational links are produced automatically from the site's database by our PHP scripts.

Initial results for S3i search engine ranking are good for key technical terms; for example, try searching Google for swageless fork, swageless eye or swageless stud.