Media Heroes – Web design portfolio

Authentic Futons is an amazingly creative Brisbane business that produces individually crafted, hand made bedroom furniture. They specialise in futon bed frames, sofa beds, hand made futons, and premium Latex Gold mattresses. They can build in a wide variety of woods including Pine, Tasmanian Blackwood, American Walnut, American Oak, American Cherry and Huon Pine and everything is made to order. The business is owned by master craftsman, Dan Walker, and encompasses the spirit of Japan in his Woolloongabba showroom. In Dan’s words, “in a world of global brands and mass production, we offer something unique that reflects you and your lifestyle”. If you haven’t visited the showroom before, please pay Dan a visit and you’ll be amazed at not only the quality, but also how affordable everything is. Don’t forget to have a good explore of his website too!

The Challenge

We started working with Dan in September 2010. When we met he had his previous website for about 5 years and although good for the time, it was looking rather outdated and used only quite basic design elements. The result was the site looked purely like a Japanese furniture specialist, it didn’t convey the quality of the products, and it didn’t appeal to people looking for beds or bed frames. The previous website did rank half way up the first page of Google for “Futons Brisbane”, but it didn’t rank for any other keywords, which really limited the visitor numbers. The end result was that the website didn’t generate many enquiries and it wasn’t effective as a marketing tool. The aim for creating a new website was to position Authentic Futons as a boutique bed store and to clearly communicate the craftsman aspect of the business. The new website needed to attract a wider market of people, not just looking for futons, but also for beds, sofa beds and latex mattresses. We needed to create a facelift for the business and allow Authentic Futons to compete with the large bed retailers, whilst communicating the uniqueness of the business.

The Solution

The design of the new website focused on showcasing Dan as a master craftsman, clearly showing the different products offered and giving visitors a taste of what can be created. The focus was to step away from the typical sales-heavy bed shop websites and to show something artistic, unique and appealing. Having said that, we still needed to retain a strong focus on generating conversions from the website to maximise enquiries.

The website included the following functionality:

• Custom HTML coded website
• J-Query sliders
• Gallery of images
• Content managed area to display specials on the homepage
• WordPress integration for the newsfeed of new information

The Result

Once the new website was complete we began work on the SEO campaign and we achieved more than 60% of the 9 selected keywords on page one within 4 months. These rankings have continued to climb over the last year as we have continued working on the campaign. At the current time (January 2012), 100% of the nine keywords are on page one and none are lower than page 1, position 5! The visitor numbers have risen over the first 12 months by over 1.85 times when you compare the same time last year and more than 3.04 times when you look at the highest month recorded since the beginning of the campaign. This is also reflected in the number of email enquiries, which has almost doubled on a monthly basis since the campaign started. This is huge achievement for a small business who is outcompeting many much larger competitors for a fraction of the budget.

Here are a few of the current search results on Google (February 2012):

• Futons Brisbane → (P1, P1)
• Beds Brisbane → (P1, P3)
• Latex Matresses Brisbane → (P1, P4)
• Mattresses Brisbane → (P1, P5)
• Bed Frames Brisbane → (P1, P4)
• Bed Shops Brisbane → (P1, P5)

The combination of a new website focused on attracting and converting the right enquiries, plus highly effective SEO has helped to power the business over the last year and will continue to drive new enquiries every week. Within the first three months of the campaign, Authentic Futons sold more latex mattresses in three weeks, than they had ever sold in a 3 month period. We are delighted to have the opportunity to work with Authentic Futons and we’ll continue delivering consistent results over the long term to give them a clear advantage in the market.