A flexible, audience-centric website for Ashtead

The challenge

Limited resources and outdated technology 

International equipment rental company, Ashtead Group were struggling with a corporate site whose design and technology had become outdated. With nearly 40% of investor traffic on mobile, Ashtead was missing out by not having a fully responsive website. The website was also built in an archaic Content Management System (CMS) that was difficult to update and was no longer supported. 

Ashtead needed a new corporate website to reflect their business of today and, meet their audience audience's needs. They needed the site to be built on a straightforward and flexible platform. As they had only a small team and a limited budget for the new website, the technical solution and project process had to be efficient.

The solution

A website built on WaaS, tailored to audience and business needs

The starting point of this project was understanding Ashtead's audience requirements and focusing on improving site usability. To do this, we gathered audience insight and expectations through our annual Webranking survey and reviewed web analytics data to gain insights into user journeys.

We found that much of the content could be stripped back for an improved user experience. We created a new top-level navigation that provided a clear overview in a dropdown menu and updated messaging to reflect Ashtead's business more clearly.

To maximise efficiency and meet their needs, we helped them build a new website on our Website as a Service (WaaS) platform, a subscription-based, secure, and scalable website solution, purpose-built for corporate websites. 

Featuring enterprise-grade infrastructure with a user-friendly interface, the WaaS platform enables companies to build and manage high-performing corporate websites that reflect their business, engage users and drive traffic.

The platform also features the technology and components that Ashtead needed to be up and running quickly, such as a financial calendar, share price charts and GDPR-compliant regulatory press releases.

WaaS also comes with the support of our team of corporate communication experts, which was valuable to Ashtead who had limited resources for website management.

The flexibility of WaaS meant that when one of the Ashtead Group businesses went through a rebrand just before launch, we could quickly adapt content and layouts to accommodate.

The impact

A future-proof website 

Ashtead now have an efficient and flexible website that enables them to tell their story clearly and effectively. The website's strong focus on meeting audience needs has significantly improved the user experience.

Building the website on the WaaS platform, which has an easy-to-use CMS, means that Ashtead now can keep the site up-to-date with relevant communication. The technology behind WaaS has increased the speed with which the business can adapt their communications in line with the business, as shown during the rebranding of one of their subdivisions shortly before launch. 

Since we are continuously improving the WaaS platform to ensure that it stays relevant and provides clients with the best possible experience, Ashtead no longer have to worry about technical updates.