Successful new website for Carpet Foundation
8th April 2009
The new Carpet Foundation website is proving a great success. Designed to drive footfall into Registered Specialists, overtly play on the link with the Office of Fair Trading, promote British made carpet and have greater accountability with harder hitting messages, it has been very well received by consumers and retailers alike.
The new design is modern, clean and easy to navigate while the content has been reorganised. It still provides the ‘everything you need to know when buying carpet’ advice but is more commercial and harder hitting. An advanced retailer search facility, which can be searched by postcode or town, includes directions and gives consumers easy up front access to their nearest Registered Specialist.
With a bank of over 150 images, each section has a random flash slide show and contains hard hitting propaganda statements. A key feature of the new site is a downloadable voucher. No definite committal to purchase is necessary and all consumers have to do is get the voucher stamped by a Registered Specialist. The incentive is that 50 individuals each month win a Threshers gift voucher worth £10.
An added bonus for retailers is that the Carpet Foundation is providing, on application, a free web page for all its retail members.
The site is also fully optimised and is now firmly entrenched in the top 5 on Google. Since 1st October, over 60,000 individuals have visited the site and 15,000 have used the site to find a retailer.
Commenting on the site’s performance, Rupert Anton, CF marketing director said: “We acknowledged that we had to become more hard nosed and really play up to our strengths. The results, however, have exceeded our expectations. Site traffic has increased; people are spending longer on the site, viewing more pages and revisiting more often. It is being used very much as ‘the definitive guide to carpet’ and is fast becoming the one stop portal for the carpet buying public. It majors on our strengths; is more aggressive against the opposition and what is more, it is all changeable in-house.”