After a long personal hiatus, the client was restarting his surfboard manufacturing business, and was in bad need of upgrading to something much better than what he had—a completely broken website that was sorely outdated technology-wise, had poor overall SEO ranking, no clear branding identity, and poor user experience with broken navigation all over the site. The client has a lot of experience in the surf industry, but didn’t have the best product photos—many were small files, poor quality, had numerous other defects, or had the old logo on the boards. Doing a product photoshoot wasn’t possible because he had no collection of surfboards on hand for that, so we had to work from whatever photos he could come up with.
He needed a whole new website. He provided a new logo that another Designer created. The product photos he came up with were a patchwork collection of snapshots. So a hurdle was collecting as many old photos from him as possible, then opening up Photoshop, and making the best of what you have. We had just enough. These are all the clients original board designs. In the process of digital imaging, we removed prior surfboard labels/logos he owned, added color where it wasn’t, borrowed acid-wash board artwork from other photos of his boards, changed their colors, added pinlines, fixed warps, removed grass, trees, arms, among other objects to bring some of these boards to life as product representations. If it weren’t for Photoshop and sound design skills this website would not present the way it does now; creating a good, consistent look with photographs of your product makes a big difference no matter how it is accomplished. Having a cool logo helps a lot, but the variety of boards and their carefully considered colors and designs, really make a big difference in the design, and he actually makes surfboards that look like the photos.
Re-designing the website was one hurdle but the most important challenge was establishing a foundation for showing up well in the search engine results. We achieved this through careful keyword research, solid information architecture, well-written content inclusive of appropriate keywords, excellent embedded structured data with schema.org conventions, local SEO, and leveraging social media.
By following the suggestion to do two main improvements in their business Delray Surf Designs has grown and improved significantly—by having their website rebuilt and by focusing on getting reviews. Because of these changes, Delray Surf Designs now ranks on the first page in Google’s search results for almost all of the surfboard category types they build that you would search for with “san diego custom surfboards,” or “san diego sunset cliffs style fish,” for example. They are even ranking on the first page without naming location (San Diego), and for both organic and local SEO results. Surfboards are a highly visual sales influencer and this level of being seen on the internet is extremely helpful to a surfboard business.
Since launching the new website Delray Surf Designs has gone from selling a couple of surfboards a month to selling multiple custom order surfboards in a week. Recently they were honored with being selected for the 2019 San Diego Award in the Surf Shop category by the San Diego Award Program. As a result of their success, they have also been accepted by the Better Business Bureau BBB with A+ Rating.
