MEL Chemicals, which produces and supplies inorganic chemicals, saw its monthly sales inquiries rocket once Arkom redesigned the website. The new website has also led to the company selling into India and China.

“The new website has made a huge difference to the business. We saw sales inquiries go from about 4 a month to more than 70 in December 2011 and now the inquiries literally come from all over the world."

Requirements:

Keen to better represent their position as a world leader, MEL chemicals were looking for an aesthetically pleasing website they could keep up to date themselves. This was challenging as they had a vast and diverse range of information with several potential contributors of content. They also required control over information availability, and the ability to shield staff email addresses from the high volumes of spam they were receiving.

Solution:

Our creative efforts drew inspiration from the Luxfer site (their parent company), crafting a professional, forward looking and corporate design that showcased MEL Chemicals as a world leader in zirconium chemicals.

After in-depth discussions on content management with the client, we developed a dynamic administrator user system. This allowed them to allocate different team members to administer certain sections of the website. We then explored and proposed several different methods of displaying technical data, before settling on the simplest and most flexible solution.

All enquiries were centralised, and are now sent via a CAPTCHA protected contact form, and the team worked meticulously to ensure that the information was collected and presented correctly. This enabled MEL to direct enquiries better and the CAPTCHA system protects their addresses from spam emails.

To enable control over their content, we allowed them to restrict access to downloads on their website via an option in their CMS. If selected, this requires visitors to register before downloading.

The final step was to provide a reliable hosting platform on which the new site would operate. This gave them access to cutting-edge web analytics, for which extensive training was provided in addition to content management training with the inbuilt search engine tools. This quickly proved to be a winning combination...

Key Outcomes:

Mel have seen an increase in enquiries by nearly 20 fold with many enquiries coming from BRIC countries.

The downloads section has reduced staff administration overheads, has also generated additional business enquiries.

The easy to use suite of web management tools backed up by Arkom's customer care programme has year on year improvements in the performance of the MEL website.

What Mel Chemicals Say About Us

“The new website has made a huge difference to the business. We saw sales inquiries go from about 4 a month to more than 70 in December 2011 and now the inquiries literally come from all over the world."

Liz Hogan
Mel Chemicals