DIY Deck Plans

Hickory Dickory Decks, the second largest deck building company in the world, approached WebFire designs about developing a website to sell deck plans as digital downloads.

Design Goals

A primary goal was to provide deck plans as digital downloads for the do-it-yourself market. The site needed to be structured to allow site visitors to quickly and easily find suitable deck plans for their own home.

Another goal was to make the site a resource for DIY deck builders, and homeowners. Articles and tutorials on how to build and maintain a deck will draw site visitors and increase sales.

We wanted to get the site into Google quickly and have it rank well for our chosen keywords.

We also wanted to use the site to generate ad revenue through partnerships with businesses offering complementary products and services.

Technical Requirements

Content Management System and Ecommerce System

First and foremost was the need for an ecommerce system and a content management system that was customizable, and flexible enough to grow as the site grew. The site had to be designed to be a pleasure to use, and allow for easy navigation, and checkout.

All content needed to categorized and structured in a way that was easily maintainable, and the system needed to be upgradable.

In addition, there needed to be the ability to incorporate video tutorials at some future date.

File Conversion

All deck plans were pre-engineered AutoCAD drawings, with photographs of completed installations in most cases. The drawings were not in a format that could be easily uploaded, and there was no existing database of deck plans, even though the company had designed thousands of deck plans over the years.

The plans needed to be converted from AutoCAD drawings, into products in the ecommerce system that customers can download and print from their home computer.

Implementation

The decision was made to use the Drupal CMS with the Ubercart ecommerce module. The store was configured according to the features of the deck plans we would be uploading.

The plans were converted by Hickory Dickory Decks from AutoCAD drawings to .pdf files and sent to us. We then took the .pdf files, optimized them for the web, along with any photographs, packaged them into a .zip file, and uploaded them to the web server.

We created customized products in the ecommerce store for each of the plans, and categorized each plan according to its features. Additional content was developed along with a custom graphic design to give the store a clean modern look.

The site was launched in the spring of 2011. Within two months the site appeared on the first page of Google for the sites’ most important keyword phrase – ‘deck plans.’

Next Steps

Over the course of the winter 2011 – 2012 we will be working extensively with Hickory Dickory Decks to develop new resource content including a deck building guide and deck building tutorials. We are continuously adding new plans to the online database.

Services: graphic design, CMS configuration, ecommerce shopping cart configuration, SEO, web promotion, web hosting, domain registration

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