Dickies International

Established in 1868, Dickies has been known as a boat builder, repairer, engineer, chandler and broker for over a century.

Today Dickies International is a premier boat yard, brokerage and the supplier of a range of new boats throughout Europe and beyond. Dickies International is also the Sole UK dealer for the Beneteau Power Boat Range.

Client's brief

To design and develop a website that would be a comprehensive resource for all new boats, including videos, image galleries, review and technical data. It needed to be easily updated via a content management system.

The website also needed to publish live stock and brokerage information from their central yacht broker database located at their HQ.

It was important the site ranked well in search engines for their range of boats.

Here's what we did

We first studied the range of new and used boats and worked out the best way to design the site for easy of navigation. Through wire frame models and information architecture we developed the site structure so that it was easy to navigate your way around the site and visually exciting. It was important that boat ranges and models could be added to the site without any navigation issues as the site expanded. No matter where you are on the site you are only 3 clicks from viewing a boat.

The site design is clear and simple and focuses on the boat content, images and videos.

We developed a system for the brokerage data that updates the website automatically each night amending the stock information from Dickies internal yacht broker application. The system also downloads the related boat images; resizing them for the web automatically. The system has an email boat alert facility that sends out emails of new stock to 'boat alert' subscribers.

We developed search engine friendly code and a content management system that could optimise each boat individually.

Our results

The site has become an excellent sales tool for all of Dickies offices giving potential customers instant access to all sales information and data. It is probably the most comprehensive yacht broker's site on the web.

Traffic to the site has tripled since launch, all coming from natural search results. On average visitors are spending over 3.30 minutes on the site with 6 page views per visit.

Here's what our client had to say

Since appointing Juretic we have gone from having a poor website to one of the leading sites in the Marine industry, our traffic has more than doubled and the ongoing optimisation of the site puts us on page one, and often number one with most search engines.

We have found a company that not only understands the web business but have taken the time to research and understand our business - invaluable!!!

Website: www.dickies.co.uk.