Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Veronica Severyn, Nick Bumgarner, Amy Wood, Shaun Tyndall, Nancy Jones
Since namesake John T. Handy established Handy Seafood in 1894, the company has taken pride in its nearly 125-year history as the oldest seafood processor in the United States. Two more long standing traditions: its headquarters in Crisfield, Maryland, also known as the World’s Crab Capital and its small, family-owned heritage. Historic is a good thing; however, antiquated, like Handy’s previous website, is not.
The Handy Seafood website was in need of major renovations for a more modern, branded user experience. Although Handy Seafood’s century-old history firmly established the company’s reputation as a leader within the industry, the dated site design didn’t build confidence with their customers. Content needed to bolster Handy Seafood’s credibility as a leader and innovator and the new design needed to be responsive for its mobile audience of sales reps, grocery buyers, restaurateurs and retail customers.
The sales funnels also needed to be cleaned up and heightened, with a more streamlined sales portal for faster, geolocated customer service communication within the distribution area and the capability to quickly access sales sheets and product info to share with customers.
Online sales have increased markedly since Inclind was first engaged. The team corrected bugs quickly and responded equally as promptly to other concerns. Communication could be overboard at times, but efficiency and quality of work generally won the day.
Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing
About the project
When asked about his main goals for the website, Handy CEO Terry Conway directed, “Let’s make them hungry.”
The design goals of the project were to create a fresh, modern, responsive design, utilize mouth-watering images and tell the Handy story to create an appetizing connection with the audience.
Other goals included simplifying the architecture of the website to guide each audience type toward the appropriate content, while at the same time keeping the selling points of Handy’s popular products, including crab meat, crab cakes and soft shell crabs, in plain view throughout the website.
Handy’s marketing team was limited in how they could update their current website, so they needed a robust content management solution to allow for creating targeted landing pages for specific products and audiences. They also needed the sales team to be able to access and share product spec sheets with customers quickly.
Lastly, to get visitors to engage more with the products, the team wanted a more robust and responsive recipes section that would be useful both in the kitchens of professional chefs and busy soccer moms.
Inclind’s director Shaun Tyndall charted the waters of project goals, while project coordinator Nancy Jones steered the ship of the web crew, which included designer Amy Wood, front-end developer Nick Bumgarner and engineer Veronica Severyn. The Inclind team collaborated on a weekly to bi-weekly basis with Handy’s leadership and marketing team to work through a design that ultimately captured their vision and met their goals.
Using the Drupal 8 platform, we designed a more refreshed, responsive website built with a higher quality, more streamlined user experience. Large slideshows were implemented for bigger, better food images that cooked up a more enticing, appetizing spread in design and layout.
The Handy Seafood sales force now has easy access to all sales tools, with a more organized product catalog. And customers can more easily direct questions and orders with a sales rep nearby through the newly implemented location function.
We also improved Handy’s e-commerce business by integrating with Shopify to target all purchases onto one site, rather than two, which also allows for Handy Seafood products to be placed on Amazon and additional marketplaces.
Drupal’s robust content management capabilities has allowed for easy access to both internally within the company and externally for visitors and customers. The new design tells the story of a generations-old company that is also relevant and steadfast as a leader in the industry. Marketing landing pages tempt the taste buds and tell the story of why Handy products are of the highest quality.
According to Don Riffle, Handy’s VP of sales and marketing, “The launch of the new website has yielded several welcomed improvements for our sales team and support staff, as well as improved functionality for our e-commerce platforms.”
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal 8 provided a secure and flexible content management solution that allowed for Handy to build custom pages, connect customers with the sales reps in their region and allow for intelligent tracking of user habits while on the website.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We used this set of modules to improve the design, increase the site’s capabilities, create a
comprehensive product and recipe catalog, and provide a seamless shopping experience.
