Hovis
Built an impactful, dynamic and engaging corporate website for the UK's leading bread producer. Utilising our UX, UI and SEO expertise to elevate the look and feel and increase engagement.
First established in 1886, Hovis is one of Britain’s oldest and most iconic FMCG brands, a household name up and down the country.
The Brief
As part of a wider brand refresh and marketing strategy for 2019/2020, Hovis reached out to a variety of agencies who pitched for implementing and managing a new, state-of-the-art website with an uplifted look and feel.
At the end of this process, we were delighted to be selected as Hovis’ agency of choice!
Hovis felt that their website’s UX and performance could be optimised, and wanted more emphasis to be placed on their brand identity and values. They also wanted to prioritise the improvement of bounce rates, dwell times and overall traffic.
The main objective for the new website was to capture the company’s rich British history and heritage while making it stand out amongst competitors with strong UX, high performance and engaging, interactive features.
You can take a look at the finished website here.
Project Objectives
- Carry out a thorough Discovery phase to define a clear strategy for the new website
- Carry out a comprehensive SEO audit and ensure that the new website improved upon rankings
- Uplift Hovis’ brand look and feel to reflect its proud, British heritage
- Create impactful page layouts with interactive features and optimised UX
- Build the new site on a Drupal 8 CMS with optimised administration panels
Drupal Development
Hovis were keen for their new website to be built on a secure, sustainable and future proof platform.
We decided that the best way to achieve this would be to build the site on Drupal 8. As an open source CMS, we were able to custom code the back end in order to tailor it to Hovis’ needs and ensure that it is as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
Discovery and Strategy
A priority for this project from the beginning was to ensure that Hovis’ new website was built with a full understanding of the company’s objectives and to ensure that it satisfied the needs of its many stakeholders and target audiences. While the website would primarily need to serve their customers, it also needed to cater to a range of users including potential stockists and career applicants.
In order to fulfil this, we began the project with a collaborative Discovery phase.
This 4-week process began with a series of stakeholder interviews, which helped us to build a strong understanding of the aspirations that each of Hovis’ teams had for the new website, from marketing and branding to careers and the HR department.
From there, we carried out a comprehensive analysis of competitor and benchmark sites, qualitative and quantitative user research, put together a detailed SEO audit and explored Hovis’ current systems architecture in order to ensure that we improved the technical set up of their website.
You can read more about how an initial Discovery phase can be vital in ensuring that projects are approached in a structured and streamlined fashion here.
Brand Uplift and UI Design
Designing and developing Hovis’ new website in line with its new brand direction was pivotal to the success of this project.
JBi worked closely with Hovis and its branding agency to create and implement a new look and feel based on the results of the Discovery phase, including new styling, fonts and colours. In doing so, we were able to give the Hovis brand a noticeable uplift.
In addition, Hovis’ emphasis on interactivity and strong visuals led us to implement a dynamic and interactive timeline of the company’s history – the Our Story section – shown below.
Results!
- 17% increase in overall traffic from organic (keyword) search
- 22% decrease in bounce rate
- 18% increase in average dwell time
- 18% increase in the average number of pages users are visiting on the website
“We are incredibly happy with the end result and proud of what has been achieved during this project. The new website is a huge step forward for Hovis and is a strong representation of our brand. The JBi team were very supportive and responsive throughout the project process.”
Amy Turner, Brand Manager at Hovis
At JBi, we want to be much more than just a web designer for our clients. We want to build ongoing relationships and act as strategic partners well beyond launch day.
In this vein, we will continue to support Hovis moving forward, assisting in marketing projects, changes to the website and more.
If you are looking for support on a digital project, you can get in touch with us by emailing hello@jbidigital.co.uk or calling us on 0207 043 2510.
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