Member Article

OverDRIVE forges advanced website for Steel Stockholder

With companies across the Midlands and Oxford and hundreds of steel products available to the trade and public, Midlands based Tamworth Steel Group needed a stylish, mobile friendly site that was straightforward for customers and prospects to use and was simple to develop and update. The company was already using Google Sheets in Drive to maintain their product database and wanted to share this information with their customers in a user friendly way.

The Solution

Often used for web portal and project workspaces, OverDRIVE proved its flexible and dynamic credentials by delivering a powerful, stylish, advanced site with the additionalbespoke functionality of a quote basket and product selector.

Tamworth Steel wanted a comprehensive site that not only featured countless variations of product sizes and specs but also a full range of services on offer across their different locations. OverDRIVE was the perfect way for the company to reuse their product database and effortlessly embed existing Google Sheets to form each of the product category pages. As they edited spreadsheets the website was updated automatically, so keeping it current was both fast and accurate.

The folder structure of OverDRIVE meant that docs and product images were easy to organise and manage. For this application, additional OverDRIVE technology was used to develop a product selector and rotating slideshow to create a highly visual, animated and user friendly product showcase to drive traffic to the individual product pages.

As well as the standard spreadsheet embed, the quote basket was an additional piece of OverDRIVE functionality which used product data, stored in a Google Sheet, and developed it into a quote using selected products. This allowed customers to generate their own initial quotes online quickly and accurately.

OverDRIVE also automatically delivered a powerful and easy to update blog for Tamworth Steel, where news stories were simply and quickly created in Google Docs and thenautomatically appeared as news items on the site.

Net Result

The Tamworth Steel Group website is now fully responsive, adapting to any screen size across all mobile devices from Androids to iPads. The site used many of the standard OverDRIVE features including spreadsheet embed, forms, blog and images but was layered with extra styling and functionality to suit the company’s specific requirements. The result was a smart looking, flexible and powerful website that was quick to develop and simple to maintain but importantly provided a user friendly experience for customers.

“Having an OverDRIVE site powered by Google Docs is brilliant for us as we already used Google Docs and Sheets and it meant that sections of our existing data could be embedded to build the new site.

Keeping the product content updated is now a cinch because it draws on our existing product database and with OverDRIVE the whole site can be quickly and easily updated. The additional functionality of a bespoke quote basket and Product Selector has given us a site which is tailor made for both us and our customers“.

Lisa Martin, Quality Manager, Tamworth Steel Stockholders Limited

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kate .