Rode Cycles, Southwell

We completed a redesign for Southwell based Rode Cycles, adding a WooCommerce product catalogue too. Rode sell high end bicycles as well as offering servicing and restorations.

The brief

As a premium dealer, the site needed to feel expensive while being clear and easy to navigate. Rode asked for a more impactful site to match their excellent branding so we went with a full page video for the intro, with large images used across the site to showcase the incredible bikes they supply.

Web design

Using our detailed briefing process, we took time to understand what Rode wanted from the new site and created wireframes & mockups to suit. This prompted further conversations and we modified things until they were happy it met theirs and their customers’ needs. This collaborative process works reall well, with gradual progress rather than a big wait and a huge reveal that might have missed the mark.

Our designs are presented to you in a web browser rather than PDFs or images, so you can see how it actually looks on phones and desktop browsers. As we design from scratch instead of using existing themes or page builders, your site can be completely custom designed.

WooCommerce

The WordPress ecommerce plugin WooCommerce was used to add a product catalogue with the option to sell online in the future. The cart and payment side of WooCommerce are disabled for now, encouraging enquiries about the products instead. The enquiry tells Rode which page the enquiry came from automatically.

There were lots of bikes to import, so we used the supplier data feeds to do a mass import to WooCommerce, saving hours of typing in product data (It’s now only a matter of time before I buy a gorgeous Italian bike!)

Web hosting

The old site was running on a cheap host, so we launched the new site on our green web hosting which offered better speed, better software support and a free SSL certificate. As usual, we developed the new site on a test address so we didn’t disrupt the live site.

Search engine readiness

We installed Google Analytics to the new site to keep an eye on visitors and how they found the site, as well as installing the Google Site Kit plugin that shows a summary within the WordPress dashboard. We also did some ‘301 redirects’ of the old website pages to make sure people end up at the right place if they followed old links.

Summary

This fresh looking redesign of Rode Cycles updated their look and paves the way for ecommerce in the future. We can help you get your products online with the easy to use and cost effective WooCommerce system – contact us today to start the conversation.