Handy Seafood Website Redesign , Development & E-Commerce Upgrade

The Handy Seafood website was in need of major renovations for a more modern, branded user experience. Although Handy Seafood’s century-old history firmly established the company’s reputation as a leader within the industry, the dated site design didn’t build confidence with their customers. Content needed to bolster Handy Seafood’s credibility as a leader and innovator and the new design needed to be responsive for its mobile audience of sales reps, grocery buyers, restaurateurs and retail customers.

The sales funnels also needed to be cleaned up and heightened, with a more streamlined sales portal for faster, geolocated customer service communication within the distribution area and the capability to quickly access sales sheets and product info to share with customers.

When asked about his main goals for the website, Handy CEO Terry Conway directed, “Let’s make them hungry.”

The design goals of the project were to create a fresh, modern, responsive design, utilize mouth-watering images and tell the Handy story to create an appetizing connection with the audience.

Other goals included simplifying the architecture of the website to guide each audience type toward the appropriate content, while at the same time keeping the selling points of Handy’s popular products, including crab meat, crab cakes and soft shell crabs, in plain view throughout the website.

Handy’s marketing team was limited in how they could update their current website, so they needed a robust content management system to allow for creating targeted landing pages for specific products and audiences. They also needed the sales team to be able to access and share product spec sheets with customers quickly.

Lastly, to get visitors to engage more with the products, the team wanted a more robust and responsive recipes section that would be useful both in the kitchens of professional chefs and busy soccer moms.

Inclind’s director Shaun Tyndall charted the waters of project goals, while project coordinator Nancy Jones steered the ship of the web crew, which included designer Amy Wood, front-end developer Nick Bumgarner and engineer Veronica Sveryn. The Inclind team collaborated on a weekly to bi-weekly basis with Handy’s leadership and marketing team to work through a design that ultimately captured their vision and met their goals.

Using the Drupal 8 platform, we designed a more refreshed, responsive website built with a higher quality, more streamlined user experience. Large slideshows were implemented for bigger, better food images that cooked up a more enticing, appetizing spread in design and layout.

The Handy Seafood sales force now has easy access to all sales tools, with a more organized product catalog. And customers can more easily direct questions and orders with a sales rep nearby through the newly implemented location function.

We also improved Handy’s e-commerce business by integrating with Shopify to target all purchases onto one site, rather than two, which also allows for Handy Seafood products to be placed on Amazon and additional marketplaces.