What happens when you run three different kinds of businesses but want to run them on the same website platform? This is the issue Quigley’s Building Supply had… until their new website we launched yesterday.
Three Templates, One Website
Quigley’s Building Supply has always evolved to respond to community needs during its over 60 years of existence. These past couple years, this has meant moving beyond building supplies and into two other areas: equipment rental and an outdoor department. These businesses within the business have related but separate logos and operate in different parts of the same building. How do we represent this idea of separate but cohesive online? Three templates running one piece of software.
Designwise, Alice made the images in the menu, headers, and sidebars all different. There is one template for the building supply side (We love the red hammer and were glad when Quigley’s did too!), one for the rental business, and one of the outdoor supply store. It’s really important that website visitors be able to move around on the website so tabs to the other sections are on each page. We also have breadcrumbs and site search allowing people to navigate the website beyond using only the menu.
What’s great is while these three parts of the website all look different, they all run on one install of WordPress. This allows the site search to work best since when a user submits a term or phrase, it searches all three parts of the site to find the information. From the angle of Quigley’s staff, this also gives them one administrative panel to log in and update the site.
To keep the look similar as website visitors move from one part of the site to another, the logos were placed in the same location and the same background color was used throughout the site. Each part of the site shows a different ‘business’ but it gives a unified sense so the web visitor understands that it is the same business.
Pro Staff
Part of the initiative of Quigleys Outdoors was to partner with area outdoor guides and give them a place to showcase their work. Many guides don’t have their own websites so this should be a valuable marketing opportunity. Each guide page has photos, information, and a contact form which gets emailed directly to the guide, allowing both Quigley’s Outdoors staff and the guides themselves to monitor referrals.
Mobile Template
We created a simple mobile template (with simplified menu going to each of the three main sections) using Obox Mobile. This way, if users are visiting from their smartphone, they can still get the information they need.
Third Party Integration
Quigley’s uses external services like social media, their eBay store, and a credit company called BlueTarp they use to give contractors and others store credit. We made all these resources easy to access and prioritized them on different parts of the website.
While the Quigley’s website seems simple, the three templates mean it only looks that way. Congratulations to Justin and the Quigley’s team on your new website!
Breaking Even Communications would like to thank Matthew Baya and Tom Beal for their contributions to this site.
Full disclosure: This business is owned by my mom and managed by my brother-in-law. Not sure what this means since they paid us to do it and we aren’t receiving any other kickbacks from it but thought I’d disclose that anyway!