Case Study: Dain's Lumber Supply Gets a New Website
The Challenge
Dain’s Lumber, based out of Peekskill, NY, is a lumber and other building material supplier, with a large outdoor (and indoor) showroom for homeowners and contractors. In business since 1848, Dain’s relationships with its customers are strong.
So, attracting customers wasn’t a major problem. What Dain’s needed was a website that simplified the shopping experience for both contractors and homeowners. With hundreds of products and brands, their previous site offered very limited information on what the supply yard carried, let alone kept in stock.
Dain’s website included several pages and used a third-party supply yard website to display the products they carried. The thinking behind this integration strategy made sense on the surface—hosted on a separate platform, the third-party site automatically updated the product info. Unfortunately, however, the products appearing on Dain’s site weren’t organization in a way that was useful to either homeowners or contractors. Visitors to the site had to muddle their way through over 20 categories that duplicated products and didn't match up to a particular type of project.
Also, one of the most challenging aspects of the website was the lack of mobile optimization. Almost impossible to navigate on mobile devices, Dain’s website was missing out on important traffic (most businesses have at least 50% of their traffic on mobile).
How We Helped
Halstead Media transformed Dain’s website to resemble their new logo and brand, organized their content (approximately 100 pages), and created a website experience that made sense to their lower Hudson Valley customers.
The new homepage features a slider of Dain’s unique callouts. Then, users are shown a section of shortcut links to product categories, followed by information about the Mill, Dain’s custom mill work division. And, finally, Dain’s Instagram feed is automatically pulled in the bottom, to show additional compelling imagery. In addition to the content organization effort, Halstead provide all new copy for every page and section.
The content is presented in:
Products: 10 categories including Roofing and Siding along with Fencing. After clicking into a product category, visitors are offered details with sub-categories. Some major categories such as Lumber & Building Materials feature in-stock products. The in-stock section (along with an events section accessible in the footer) is easy to update by Dain’s — which was an important need for them.
Resources: Delivery services, SDS, along with some others.
Showrooms: While Dain’s has one location, they have multiple showrooms at their site.
The Mill: A link to a separate area of their business.
About: Dain’s rich history is integrated throughout their website, but it deserves its own section to highlight their timeline.
