Kennards Self Storage Website

Responsive Website & Business Systems Integration.

Kennards Self Storage is the largest storage provider in Australia and New Zealand. FIRST was briefed to “reimagine” the Kennards website. The existing site had been running for almost 10 years and was in need of replacement.

Designing for a vision
Most importantly, the new site needed a responsive solution. Kennards’ site lacked mobile responsiveness, which was impacting on performance and the overall experience for customers. Some of the key goals were to:

• Increase overall site visits,
• Increase conversions,
• Improve conversion rate (especially on mobile devices),
• Improve SEO rankings,
• Create a platform for dedicated SEM activity – landing and dedicated campaign pages etc.
• Setup a single CMS to make updates simple and flexible across multiple domains,
• Create a better overall user experience:
• Simplified rental process,
• Improved Box Shop eCommerce,
• Create well-structured informational content.

Approach
FIRST took a multi-disciplined approach. Technical investigation and scoping of the integrations between the inventory management and booking systems ran concurrently with research and the user experience design process.
The UX team developed journeys and flows for the unit rental process. Multiple iterations lead to a smooth, simple flow. Customers can rapidly find the perfect unit to suit their needs and make a reservation all on a single page.
The FIRST creative team worked closely with the KSS team to design a fresh website with the scope to grow. Special attention was given to the key process areas of the site – reserving and renting storage spaces, the Box Shop and all communications such as emails and SMS.

And we delivered…
The new website is built on an enterprise-level Content Management System (Kentico) which has been used to handle the cleanly structured modular content. The CMS gives the KSS team full autonomy to add and edit rich content across the entire site. This is especially useful for creating ad hoc campaigns and landing pages to accompany marketing activities both on and offline.
The KSS inventory management is fully integrated with the CMS and the booking engine had a ground-up rebuild so it now runs lightning-fast and efficiently. Autoscaling and load-balanced hosting means the site deals with any level of traffic.
Since launch the site has seen month-on-month growth due to its improved SEO performance and enhanced usability. The KSS team are realising efficiencies when dealing with customers, making their jobs easier.