Bridgewell Resources: Multi-Division Marketing Website 

The Overall Problem

Bridgewell Resources is an Enterprise Solutions commodities broker, connecting manufacturers, distributors, retailers, construction companies, and agricultural providers across the globe. Bridgewell has cultivated multiple district business lines that service very unique markets, pairing suppliers of goods with the companies in need of those goods, across a variety of markets.

Because of the very diverse nature of the Bridgewell business lines, the company’s marketing needs were also very diverse. However, for simplicity of management, the Marketing team wanted a single, unified, and flexible toolset around which they could direct their marketing efforts. Each business line needed to be both distinct and separate from the others, but still clearly part of the mothership. Bridgewell engaged GRAYBOX to help navigate this challenging design and development project to allow them to continue to grow and scale their business.

Our Solution

1. Creating a custom UX and UI Design

Bridgewell Resources had a challenging problem to be solved: how to create a single website that accomplishes the goals of multiple business divisions? Not only did some requirements for the divisions differ, but the type and depth of products and content differed between divisions as well. Where one may be heavily product focused, the other may be more highly service focused. Crafting an experience and interface that could be intuitive across multiple audiences, each with potentially different goals for how they would interact with the site, required a unique and custom solution. To address this challenge, GRAYBOX designed a flexible workflow, leveraging some global elements for the site to provide consistency for any user, and then designing a dozen flexible and dynamic page templates that could be used interchangeably within the needs of each division. This allowed any given division to choose the entry paths, landing pages, detail pages, and depth of content that was important to their needs, while ignoring the components potentially in use by the others. The result is a workflow experience specific to the needs of each division, but built on the same templates so that long-term maintenance has been incredibly low friction.

2. Developing the site on a flexible CMS (ExpressionEngine)

While most of the Bridgewell content lives at the business division level, some content was either interchangeable between divisions, or globally used in association with Bridgewell. Combined with the flexible UX design planned for the site, GRAYBOX needed to select a CMS platform that would be easy for the Bridgewell team to maintain themselves, but sufficiently sophisticated to support the very customized multi-division approach to the site. The GRAYBOX team selected ExpressionEngine as the CMS for the project because of the versatility that platform offered. The multiple data types were easily created as various data channels and entries, making them universally available in the system. Content tagging, page templates, and user permissions were used to ensure only the appropriate content was available in any given area of the site. With a capable in-house development team, GRAYBOX also worked to setup the ExpressionEngine site within the Bridgewell AWS account, and to synchronize our code base with their internal code repository. We additionally took our project team on site to provide their development team a two-day intensive training on the inner workings of ExpressionEngine so they could serve as the Tier 1 technical support to their internal stakeholders. This was all made possibly through the easy learning curve and straight forward functionality of ExpressionEngine.

3. Creating a versatile marketing toolkit

Ultimately, the new website was intended as a marketing tool, planned and executed by the Bridgewell Marketing shared services group, and additionally driving business to each of the divisions. GRAYBOX implemented a number of marketing tools for the Bridgewell team. First, we created a series of landing page templates that were made available for specific campaigns, including both digital and print efforts. These provided the team the ability to easily spin up division and content specific pages in support of trade shows, marketing campaigns, business cards, etc. Second, GRAYBOX built several aspects of the site with the ability to flexibly insert dynamic contact info. Specifically, different offers and divisions required different contact end points, so the people who receive the calls and emails differ based on where in the site the visitor initiates contact. Additionally, GRAYBOX helped implement CallRail for additional analytics and source attribution for gauging the effectiveness of the marketing efforts. Finally, GRAYBOX built a deep understanding of the needs of the Bridgewell target audience across the multiple divisions, and used this knowledge to ensure key information was quickly presented to users performing a search for products offered by Bridgewell.