RDA Corporation

Project at a Glance

RDA helped Calphalon redesign their website and integrate it with Cooking.com for a seamless user experience. The new site has launched with double the planned first year sales, reduced email inquiries by 700/month, reduced phone call inquiries to customer care representatives by 200/month, and increased website search hits.

About Our Client

Calphalon is a business unit of Newell Rubbermaid that designs and manufactures high end cookware and quality kitchenware for the global market. The Calphalon brand has grown through the years from strictly cookware to bakeware, cutlery, utensils and accessories, including kitchen electrics.

Background

Calphalon decided to relaunch Calphalon.com with the objective of creating a “best in class” brand site by building and developing an integration between the Calphalon website and Cooking.com for a seamless user experience. RDA helped Calphalon integrate their home site with the store site, hosted by Cooking.com, which handles the eCommerce component of the site. (Previously, customers couldn’t buy online through the Calphalon site.)

As part of this effort, Calphalon decided to make some style and design changes to the Calphalon.com home page. These changes were intended to provide a better user experience and more visibility into Calphalon’s product offerings and other features within the site. Additionally, Calphalon wanted to make the content on the home page more user editable. Prior to this project, Calphalon depended on a vendor to create graphical assets and make content changes to their website. They spent numerous days each time they updated the animation on their home page with new content. Calphalon wanted a design that would allow employees to edit more of the content as needed.

The Calphalon.com relaunch was intended to meet the following business goals:

• Share Calphalon’s culinary passion in order to create a long-term relationship with consumers driving brand preference, and advocacy.
• Establish the website as the #1 source of information for Calphalon, its products and culinary content.
• Drive consumers to the retail site, with a vision of developing full eCommerce capabilities on Calphalon.com.
• Participate in a more engaged dialogue with consumers.
• Leverage site architecture and content to support additional portals that will support new business initiatives.

Solution Detail

Leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft BizTalk Server (for back end integration), RDA integrated the Calphalon website with Cooking.com for a seamless user experience.

RDA worked with key Calphalon stakeholders to establish a design and technical approach for redesigning the Calphalon home page. The critical factors for the redesign included:

• Agility and self-reliance in making content changes to the home page in the future
• Mobile device compatibility
• A Flash alternative that would be search engine friendly

RDA implemented numerous configuration, style and design changes to the home page to provide these editing capabilities. We developed a custom banner rotator and editor that plugs into SharePoint which allows our client to make text and image edits, pulling from a library of digital assets. The home page template was set up so that scrolling banners can be customized and edited through SharePoint.

Prior to RDA’s solution, the site used Flash animation, which was not compatible with certain mobile devices and also not search engine friendly. RDA rewrote the animation functionality using customized html and jquery code, which is very cross-browser compatible. The marketing team can now replace text and graphics incorporating animation with SEO-friendly content. They can make changes on demand, as often as desired. In addition to the new editing capabilities, the new site design provides for an improved user experience and more visibility into Calphalon’s product offerings and other features within the site.

RDA also created a microsite framework that enables Newell Rubbermaid to build out an entire site with content using SharePoint. This framework makes use of the banner rotator and editor to configure and display all graphics and logos. The microsite solution automatically generates gradient and button images used on the site, allowing team members to change color schemes and restyle the design easily. In addition to the Calphalon home page, our client is leveraging the banner rotator for its Unison product line as well as for the Dymo division of Newell Rubbermaid.

Future enhancements to the application include functionality that will enable them to track which zones are clicked on in an image (image mapping). By tracking how specific images perform when they are displayed, Calphalon will be able to tag content with metrics and create customized visitor experiences based on user profile data.

The resulting solution has helped Calphalon strengthen its online presence and contributes toward the following goals:

• Successfully evolve Calphalon’s brand identity from the “culinary authority” to the “approachable expert,” sharing a connection with consumers at an emotional level.
• Build brand awareness and consideration through a high-impact marketing mix.
• Deepen brand impact by differentiating the brand at critical consumer touch points throughout the purchase experience.

Benefits

Calphalon is experiencing the following benefits as a result of RDA’s work:

• Beat launch year sales plan by 105%
• Reduced monthly expenses by 95%.
• Reduced email inquiries to customer care center by 700/month.
• Reduced phone call inquiries to customer care center by 200/month.
• Increased search hits by including textual content that was previously “hidden” in Flash movies and images into the main HTML, where search engines can find it and index it.

Technically Speaking

This project included Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft BizTalk Server (for back end integration).

Cooking.com hosts the shopping pages on sub-domain store.calphalon.com versus a separate store domain. The Calphalon.com site was updated in both appearance and interfaces to the store.calphalon.com code.

RDA built WCF services, URL redirects, and various page updates throughout the site to hook the two sites together to make them appear as a single, seamless site.

RDA was tasked with the following:

• Redesign main home page promo: Provide a means for Calphalon to “build” promos based on predefined layouts and user supplied text and images.
• Create call-out web part: Create a new web part that can be used for call-outs on the Calphalon.com Home Page.
• Replace scrolling banner with fixed banner and new page background: The current scrolling promo will be removed and replaced with a fixed position promo. The promo will rotate in place through the available promos. The background on the home page will be replaced to accompany the fixed promos.

To implement customizable promos, RDA developed a SharePoint solution that allowed banners and promos to be built using SharePoint familiar List interface combined with a custom editor for building the promos. This allowed Calphalon administrators to layer content such as HTML, Flash video, and graphics from their stock library of images to be layered together to form the final promo.