Reboot

Hoffman Nursery’s website was getting a little long in the tooth. While it wasn’t a relic from the days of Geocities pages and AltaVista, the site had several problems. Its search engine optimization was lacking, which meant potential customers weren’t finding the nursery’s site when they typed terms like “ornamental grasses North Carolina” into search engines like Google or Yahoo. Also, most of the site’s content was cordoned off to a restricted area. Visitors were forced to register and log in to view this content.

“It was not what I’d call a dynamic site,” said Shannon Currey, the nursery’s director of sales and marketing. “Making changes was difficult; we didn’t have a lot of control over content. It had become a liability – it made it difficult for the site to be the tool we needed it to be.”

Reach for the sky
So the Hoffman crew set some goals for the new site. One of the first topics that came up was education.

“Grass has become so much more popular in recent years, but there are still many people who aren’t familiar with it, don’t know much about it,” Currey said. “We wanted to help drive that demand for our customers by providing a resource not only for them but for their customers as well – that final consumer in the chain.”

Another goal was to make the site more dynamic while doing a better job of explaining what makes their plants special. The new site needed a content management system that allowed the staff to create new descriptive pages for its products, and do it easily and quickly.

“From a sales standpoint, you want to be able to explain that having a good quality plant is ultimately cost-effective for them,” Currey said. “If you order 5,000 liners, you want to be able to grow them out without having to babysit them. We do a lot of things really well at the nursery and getting that across to our customer base was difficult without a website to which we could add dynamic content. It’s hard to do on a phone call.”

Another goal was to make the new site easier to navigate. When you load your website with tons of content, you run the risk of causing information overload. The Hoffman crew wanted website visitors to find what they’re looking for in the fewest possible amount of clicks.

Two of those groups, growers and landscape professionals, are Hoffman Nursery’s direct customers. And those two groups use grasses differently. Even though growers are often growing for landscape professionals, they need different tools and information. So the nursery created separate sections of its site for those groups, plus a third, mostly education-focused section for home gardeners. They made these sections hard to miss, prominently placing them right on the home page.

“We have a very different conversation with our customers if they are buying for a landscape project or for container production,” Currey said. “It depends where they are in that supply chain. That’s why we felt we needed different information. If you’re a grower, you don’t want to have to sort through all this stuff about landscapes if that’s not what you’re looking for. People want information quick, quick, quick, and it’s more likely to be helpful if they can get to it easily and understand it easily. That’s what we wanted to accomplish with the sections.”

The new site went live in early January and Currey has been showing it off at recent trade shows. So far, response has been favorable.
 

The growers that stopped by Hoffman’s booth to check out the redesigned site commented that being able to easily access information like the growing conditions for container production for a particular plant was very helpful. Landscape professionals said they liked the site’s selection and search tools that help them find the right plant for their job.

Both growers and landscape professionals appreciated that there were fewer steps necessary to get pricing and availability.

The “bloglike” updates have attracted attention, too. If a grower learns about a new sedge, the content management system lets the staff pop a post onto the site right away.

“People want changing content,” Currey said. “You can’t just have a site where nothing happens. Now, we have a site where everything happens.”

— Matt McClellan