Jacuzzi

Jacuzzi is the leading global manufacturer and distributor of bath products for the residential and commercial markets.

Today, Jacuzzi offers luxury product lines of bathtubs, walk in bathtubs, showers, sinks, and hot tubs for every style and budget. Backyard or bath, the Jacuzzi name stands for beauty, versatility, and excellence.

Due to the many pages of content and first generation web technologies the Jacuzzi website used, Jacuzzi needed a team of specialists to organize and create an easier way to manage content so they could reduce costs and optimize their site for better functionality.

Genacom streamlined the web structure to meet these needs and also worked with Jacuzzi to create a better user experience for their visitors.

The situation

Jacuzzi's website carried an enormous amount of content: product lines across bathtubs, walk-in tubs, showers, sinks and hot tubs, each with models, specifications, imagery, dealer information and support material, all built on first-generation web technology. Publishing anything took specialists, small changes took days, and the structure had grown in ways that made the site harder to use than the products deserved. Jacuzzi wanted to reduce the cost of managing all of it and, at the same time, give visitors a site that was easy to navigate.

What Genacom did

Genacom started with the information architecture. The product catalogue was reorganized around how buyers actually shop, navigation was simplified so that any product could be reached in a few clicks, and page templates were rebuilt so that content editors could publish without engineering help. Genacom's designers worked with Jacuzzi's team on the user experience, and its programmers built the application support behind the new structure, including the tooling that made ongoing content management cheaper. Once live, the site moved onto Genacom's website management plan so that updates, performance and creative support continued without a project each time.

The results

Jacuzzi reported the outcomes listed here: an enhanced overall website experience and performance, simplified navigation that improved usability, and a 46 percent increase in web traffic. The internal cost of managing content fell because the structure and the tooling did the work that specialists used to do by hand. Jacuzzi's executive summarized the engagement: "Superb job, thank you for the hard work and the speed it was completed. Much better user experience."

What it shows

A large content site does not need a large in-house team if the architecture is right and the management is continuous. Genacom's approach pairs a one-time restructuring with an ongoing plan, so the improvements hold as the catalogue keeps growing. For a manufacturer or brand with hundreds of products, that combination is usually cheaper than either a full-time web staff or a redesign every few years.

Services involved

Website management, information architecture, user experience design, creative support, application development and ongoing content maintenance. Read about custom web development and design and content updates and maintenance, or request a quote.

How the restructure was done

The work began with an audit of every page, template and asset on the site, mapped against the product catalogue and against analytics showing how visitors actually moved through it. That audit produced a new information architecture organized by how buyers shop, with product families, models, specifications and support material in predictable places. Genacom's designers prototyped the navigation and page templates and tested them with Jacuzzi's team before development began. Programmers then built the templates and the content tooling so that adding a model, updating a specification or launching a promotion became a form to fill in rather than a development ticket. Content was migrated into the new structure in batches, with redirects from every old address so that search rankings and inbound links were preserved. After launch the site moved onto a monthly website management plan covering hosting, security, monitoring, updates and creative support, so the gains held as the catalogue continued to grow.

Why the cost of managing content fell

Most of the expense in a large content site is not hosting or design; it is the specialist time every change requires when the structure is wrong. Jacuzzi's savings came from removing that dependency: editors could publish confidently, the templates enforced consistency, and the tooling handled the mechanics that used to need a developer. The 46 percent increase in traffic followed from the same work, because a faster, clearer site is easier for search engines to index and easier for visitors to use. For any manufacturer or brand with hundreds of pages, the pattern is the same: fix the architecture once, then keep it managed.

Signs your site has the same problem

Jacuzzi's challenge shows up in manufacturers, distributors and multi-product businesses of every size. Product pages that look different from one line to the next, navigation that mirrors the org chart instead of the way customers shop, a content team that waits days for a developer to publish a routine change, and search rankings that never improve because the site's structure works against the search engines. Genacom's website management model addresses all of it as ongoing work rather than a one-time redesign: the architecture is fixed first, the templates and editorial tools are built so the client's own team can publish, and the site is then maintained, measured and refined month after month by the same team that restructured it.