Out-Shipping the Competition: Transforming a Website into an Effective Selling Tool
Meet PAC
From innovative bubble-mailers to custom-designed specialty packaging and contract packaging services, PAC Worldwide Corporation powers companies around the globe. Their clients range from large retailers to up-and-coming brands who ship everything from books and apparel to tech gadgets, perishables, and pharmaceuticals.
Think chain retailers like Target and The Home Depot, fashion brands like Patagonia and Hanes, tech companies like HP and Best Buy, and the home shopping network QVC.
PAC is the leader in safe, affordable shipping for high-volume companies. They needed a website that reflects the services they offer, showcases their products and solutions, and facilitates their custom design services — all while still being easy to handle on the back end.
Contents
The Challenge
How do you get your customers excited about new product packaging?
That’s the question PAC was asking themselves when they began considering a website redesign.
Their packaging products and services are industry-leading and innovative, and getting that passion across to their customers was going to require a website that went beyond simply listing their products. They needed an eye-catching, engaging site that could act as an active part of their sales funnel.
However, they also didn’t want a website that required advanced coding skills to update their content. They needed a features-rich front end, with an easy-to-manage back end.
The Strategy
Fingerprint Marketing worked with PAC to create a dynamic website that would not only showcase their products and services in a compelling way, but that will be easy for their team to manage and update as their business grows.
The result?
A powerful sales tool that effectively communicates their value to new customers and encourages existing customers to expand their business.
We did it by creating:
- An easy-to-use theme
- Feature-rich templates
- A custom product designer
- Built-in tools to simplify adding content and managing the site
An Easy-To-Use Theme
At Fingerprint Marketing, we know the most engaging website in the world isn’t valuable to our clients if it’s not simple to use.
With that goal in mind, our team developed the PAC website theme as a child-theme of the Divi Framework. Divi is a powerful and intuitive front-end editor that offers responsive editing and real-time design, meaning the PAC team doesn’t need to be coding experts in order update their site.
Our goal was to give PAC the benefits of the Divi template system while still having the features of an entirely custom theme.
We knew they didn’t want to reinvent the wheel every time they added a new product or blog post to the site, so our team created a complete set of custom templates for posts, post formats, pages, archives, and other common pages.
And because each page and template completely adheres to WordPress standards, the theme is compatible with plugins and easily updated in order to help keep the site secure.
Visualizing Products and Services with Feature-Rich Templates
When we talk about templates, we’re not talking about cookie-cutter pages.
In order to help customers visualize how they can work together, PAC needed to easily be able to create feature-rich pages. Our team did this by creating custom page templates that they could quickly customize with shortcodes.
Shortcodes let the PAC team quickly display common pieces of content in any page or post:
- Lists of recent videos
- Lists of recent posts
- Social icons
- Call-to-action buttons
- Content boxes
- Videos
This means the PAC team doesn’t have to hire a developer or WordPress expert in order to build new pages. They can simply use pre-existing templates and shortcodes to drop in the engaging videos and photography that make their products and services come alive.
For example, to showcase their contract packaging services, we built a landing page that features a video and text, followed by a menu of services.
When a service is selected, a script automatically adds the service to the contact form at the bottom of the page, making it simple for interested customers to get in touch.
Custom Product Designer
A big part of PAC’s business model is custom work, printing everything from bubble mailers to temperature-control pouches for medical packaging with their clients’ branded designs.
PAC needed customers to be able to visualize the final product and submit their designs, so we created the Build-A-Mailer design tool. It’s a simple drop-and-drag editor that lets customers add shapes and text, or upload custom logos.
We used the WooCommerce plugin in addition with a Custom Product Designer plugin. It was a tricky bit of development that required a number of modifications to make it all work.
However, we didn’t want to saddle PAC with a completely-custom solution that would require cumbersome upgrades. Instead of editing the plugin directly or creating templates from scratch, our team made all WooCommerce edits via filters, which ensures that future upgrades will be as easy as possible.
Using off-the-shelf plugins with modifications done via filters also allowed us to spin up a very complex product designer feature in a very short period of time.
Easy Management Tools
On the back end of the website, our goal was to streamline all the tasks they do regularly, cutting down on the time the PAC team spends updating the site and adding content.
To do that, we added a number of convenient features to the final site:
Hero Images: Most page templates include a Hero Image, which is set by specifying a custom thumbnail for the page. Because PAC wanted all the Hero Images to be styled in a particular way, we built a feature into the page templates that automatically styles an image without the need for special processing.
Press Releases Custom Post Type: PAC wanted to maintain an archive of press releases separate from their blog posts. We created a custom post type to provide the familiar WordPress post admin interface while allowing the addition of custom fields to contain the extra information needed.
Site-Wide Content Updates: In addition to the Divi Theme Options, we created another set of child-theme options to make it simple to update copyright content and social link urls across the website, rather than having to track down every instance individually.
Simple Styling Options: We also added extra fields to the child-theme options to allow custom CSS or scripts to be inserted into the theme. This allows the client to add code snippets such as Google Analytics tracking or modify the styling of the site via CSS — without needing a developer’s background.
The Outcome
PAC Worldwide Corporation’s new website is a powerful, dynamic sales tool — and it’s also extremely simple for their team to use.
Rather than a static website with product lists and specs, PAC now has an engaging site that effectively draws in prospective clients and showcases additional services to current customers.
It’s a website that reflects the innovation and passion that has defined PAC since its beginnings, and which can continue to grow with them as their business does.
