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customers and stakeholders consulted in the process
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new multilingual sites designed and deployed
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core web vitals scores
The client
Hitachi Solutions have a unique approach to meeting the complex organisational challenges faced by their clients across multiple sectors. It’s an approach which combines proven processes, leading edge Microsoft technology and highly-experienced people creating inspirational work.
Part of the Hitachi Group of companies, they apply their expertise and deep sector knowledge across three broad categories: digital innovation, cloud solutions and lifetime support services.
The challenge
Things had changed in the five years since the last major update of Hitachi Solutions website. Their business had grown and their client offering had developed. Additions had been made to the site over the years, but these had led to a confusing user journey and an information overload.
The Hitachi Solutions website is not transactional, with the aim being for potential clients to contact a consultant to discuss their needs. It was felt, therefore, that the new site should include only summary information, providing compelling snapshots of their services and outlining strengths and experience.
Importantly, there was to be much more emphasis placed on the company’s people-first approach to technological innovation, as this is what sets them apart from the competition.
Research had shown that a lot of people were visiting the site to get an idea of Hitachi Solutions as a potential employer. As this was the case, more needed to be done to highlight their employer brand, including emphasis on their people-first approach, career options and company culture.
Finally, as Hitachi Solutions had expanded their operations into Portugal and Bulgaria, along with their existing presence in Germany, France and UK, the new site had to be adapted to five different languages.
What we did
In-depth discovery
We ran an extensive discovery process to ensure our teams knew the business inside out. This started with stakeholders from across Europe, and then moved into an extensive customer and prospect interview process. Our goal was to know as much about Hitachi Solutions’ clients as the internal marketing teams did, and to unearth insights that would enable the best possible solution.
This discovery period ensured we could meet our key objectives: to attract new users to the site, and to ensure those users saw the real Hitachi Solutions in its best light.
SEO Foundations
Our teams utilised our extensive research to craft taxonomies built around search intent, that spanned five countries and languages. Every element of the site structure was purposefully created to aid user experience and deliver maximum impact for search. Every piece of copywriting for the site married readability and findability in equal measure.
The sites now form a key part of the client journey and are starting to reach new audiences through the breadth and strength of Hallam’s SEO work.
An accessible, flexible and fast digital experience
We built a large, multilingual website for English, French, German, Portuguese and Bulgarian speakers in WordPress, transitioning away from EpiServer / Site Core which was too complex for their needs.
The site’s design is bold and unlike anything else in the consultancy sector – just like Hitachi Solutions. Where competitors focus on technology, Hitachi focuses on people, and that extends to the site’s design.
It meets WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards, is blazingly fast (test it and see for yourself) and is built around a flexible block system that means the client team can continue to scale and grow the site, safe in the knowledge that they have huge scope to design the experience they need now and into the future.
The site is built on WordPress and is a leading example of what the platform can achieve for large corporate clients, without the need to invest in costly licences for enterprise CMS.
We built a suite of bespoke flexible drag and drop content blocks that were used to build the majority of the website and provided the flexibility and ease of content management Hitachi Solutions were looking for. This included blocks that allowed for rich media and videos to be added along with dynamic blocks that brought data from other areas of the site. Integrations for the new sites included pulling data from the Smart Recruiters platform for career vacancies and sending form submissions from the website through to Microsoft Dynamics 365 via ClickDimensions.
The results
The result of our work is a responsive, accessible and high performance website.
Since the site launched, across users from all channels (compared to the same period last year), we’ve seen a:
- 15% decrease in bounce rate
- 35% increase in pages per session
- 28% increase in average session duration
Alongside this, our work has also achieved:
- Over 95% mobile speed scores
- 100% desktop speed scores passing all major Core Web Vitals
“I was impressed with the depth of knowledge across the various disciplines and the level of enthusiasm that was sustained throughout a long and sometimes complex project. Nothing is too much trouble for the people at Hallam, all of whom are just really nice. A particular shout out for our Project Manager who was calm, professional and proactive whilst dealing with multiple people, challenges and languages, over an extended period of time. Hallam delivered what they promised to and we are very pleased with the results.”
Sally-Ann Smith, Head of Website Re-launch at Hitachi Solutions
Do you have a similar project in mind?
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Just tell us what you want to achieve, and we’ll let you know what experience we have in your sector, and how we can help you. Alternatively, you can check out more of our work here. Our methodology has been successful in almost all sectors, delivering double and triple-digit improvements on average.