Company: BRUMARK Total Flooring Solutions, & Exploring.com company
Website: www.Brumark.com
E-mail: websales@brumark.com
Description: Brumark offers carpet and flooring products in the tradeshow and event industry, as well as a variety of special event flooring.
The new Brumark.com Web site will surprise returning customers if they have not visited since the redesign. The new site features a clean layout, with rotating product images located front and center on their homepage.
Most of the main menu items on the site also open a sub menu for more distinct services, products or options making the Brumark site easy to navigate. Sub menu items are also placed in commonsense locations within their parent menu.
Brumark does have some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) changes they could make to their meta data tags which would be beneficial for potential visitors. These tags tell search engines what content is on their Web site.
The homepage has 19 keywords in its meta data, which is a little bit high. When a site uses more than 10 keywords, there is a possibility that the effect of the most important keywords is diluted. Search engines don’t weigh keywords as heavily as they used too, but they can still deliver a more targeted audience.
The meta description, the text a search engine uses to describe a site, is another way Brumark can enhance their SEO. The description for Brumark reads like a list of keywords, but it should really be a sentence or two that describes the company and their services. These descriptions should be no more than 150 characters as a rule of thumb.
While these changes can deliver a more targeted visitor from online searches, the site already functions as a good resource for industry professionals.
“The main purpose of our Brumark Web site is to offer our customers an easy flooring resource that they could use themselves or offer to their clients,” said Dave Walens, president of Brumark. “To prominently feature the products and services of Brumark, our Web site not only has buttons that directly link customers to our various product and service pages, but they can also do a quick search for specific flooring options.”
The product and services pages, the bread and butter of the site, are the first two tabs on the main menu. Clicking on a specific category gives the user details ranging from color variety to product specifications.
Among those product categories are carpeting, interlocking and hardwood floors, raised flooring, specialty design and digitally printed flooring. The service categories include dyeing, rentals, binding and custom design to name a few.
“We’ve also included ‘call out’ boxes to highlight promotions and featured products,” Walens said. “Additional commentary is also available on our blog and our photo gallery allows our customers to see our products in action.”
Like most Web pages, the Brumark.com looks to educate visitors, but it also provides an online purchasing platform as one of its’ major functions.
“The website is another extension of our customer service with secure online ordering and a streamlined capability to retrieve in-depth purchasing information,” Walens said. “The process is simple. Customers can type in the dimensions of their exhibit space and our system will automatically calculate the amount of product needed to complete the order.”
The site was designed and divided into these separate parts to allow customers to use the site as a flooring resource above all else. Once a visitor decides it is time to buy, Brumark designed the secure portion of their site to allow registered customers access to pricing and other confidential information.
This separate but equal approach to the overall function of the site is another way Brumark makes their site user-friendly. Instead of combining the informational aspect with the sales aspect and overwhelming a visitor, they keep the functions separated by a login. Thus, the site does not force registration on the customer who is just looking for ideas.
“Our customers are primarily experiential designers and producers for tradeshows and events,” Walens said. “With this in mind, we’d designed our site to speak to the concerns and interests of the market – easy product selection and navigation, visual support and simple functionality. We wanted to keep the site clean, so we took on a ‘less is more’ concept with the creative layout.”
Whether the visitor is an industry veteran or a newcomer, the Brumark.com online ordering interface does most of the work.
“By offering other accessories, such as extension cords, portable cases and carpet bags online, customers have a one-stop solution for their purchase needs,” Walens added.
As a registered user, visitors can also access an FTP site to upload graphics for specialty print projects or download tear sheets, brochures and high-resolution images for use in project renderings.
Quick Hits
I’ll link to that:
Alta Vista has a tool that identifies sites that link to a specific webpage or base URL. According to the site, Brumark.com has 90 external websites that link to their page.
To-Do list:
Submit your site to DMOZ and Yahoo online directories. DMOZ powers the search directory services for Netscape, AOL, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit and other search engines. This will help increase your keyword search engine rankings.
Final thought:
“Trade professionals will be pleased with the information and the capabilities they will receive as a registered user at Brumark.com,” said Walens.
