Project Overview

Beam Communications aims to be the world’s leading designers and manufacturers of satellite communication equipment. Their new responsive website uses cutting edge design to showcase the innovation, creativity and technological expertise of their market leading products designed here in Australia.

The striking homepage design immediately provides context for Beam’s products, and gives a feeling of reliability and trust.

Project Commissioner

Beam Communications

Project Creator

Butterfly

Project Brief

Modern, sleek and responsive — these are the hallmarks of a successful global communications company, and exactly the features Beam Communications wanted their new website to have.

Beam’s website is a catalogue of their products. It's where resellers go to investigate top of the line satellite communication equipment and get technical support. So, it’s an information heavy website that provides product specifications and a very detailed support FAQ’s.

Our job? Give Beam’s website the chic look and feel of a modern communications company without sacrificing essential product information.

Project Innovation/Need

Beam needed to revitalise the global hub of their business. With a site as powerful and flexible as Beam’s new one, building a backend that’s easy to use is a challenge. We started with a lightning-fast search capability that allowed administrators to easily create and manage complex product information appearing on the frontend.

To differentiate themselves from their competitors, Beam wanted something they could call their own without breaking the bank. Something unique, but not built from scratch. By building on and customising an existing product component for their range of available products we had power over the design, but more importantly for Beam, the functionality of the site.

A unique challenge Beam faced was the volume of enquiries for product information. Butterfly created the Beam Support Centre, which makes finding product technical information a dream.

User Experience

Beam’s previous website was a legacy to the pre-responsive web design era. Text heavy with minimal graphics, it was only really functional on a desktop. The overhaul by Butterfly included meeting the challenge of showcasing their 100 products beautifully despite the need for technical details.

Clear cut product photography is not usually what comes to mind when considering what can make a website look great, however that’s what our designers had to work with. To Beam’s audience, this was an important factor - being able to see clearly what products are on offer. Butterfly worked to integrate the photography into the clean design easily, coupling it with engaging imagery to bring the website to life.

Project Marketing

Features throughout the website that are usually considered a standard have all been custom designed with Beam’s audience base in mind. The search functionality has various levels, including a global search, item specific search, and a filtered search. An interactive world map allows users to easily locate resellers around the globe. The menu has even been designed to include a featured product or page, for users to navigate to key content easily.

Another key part of the restructure of information was to organise the huge amounts of data that made it easy for users to navigate, and view across different devices - tables spell trouble for users on mobile. We welcomed the opportunity to explore a solution, building a custom component where Beam can create a table and load it with product information. And, when the table is shrunk down onto a mobile screen, it’s easy to use and looks great.

Google Analytics provided an insight into the visitor data, with a comparison between the three month period of Dec 2016 - Feb 2017 to same period previous year, Dec 2015 - Feb 2016:

New visits to the site has increased by 20%
Page views up by 14%
Mobile views up by 46%