Overview
Turned a global maritime services group's website into a customer-focused sales and service platform. Replaced a site structured around business divisions with one built around customer journeys and solutions, adding interactive calculators and estimators that measurably increased engagement and sales interest after launch.
Who This Is For
Global maritime, shipping and technical-services groups with several business divisions and a complex service portfolio. This case is most useful if:
- your website mirrors your organisation chart rather than what customers are trying to solve
- customers struggle to see how your services connect
- business areas publish independently, on different foundations
- the group keeps acquiring, integrating or separating businesses
The Challenge
Wilhelmsen's portfolio spanned marine products, ships agency, ship management, maritime logistics, technical services, training and insurance.
Its websites were organised the way the group was organised. Visitors could see the structure of companies and divisions, but not what Wilhelmsen actually offered, how its services related to one another, or which one fitted a particular operational need.
The group needed a customer-focused platform that could absorb organisational change, support distributed publishing and contribute more directly to business development.
Our Approach
We started with research and built everything else on it.
- Customer and stakeholder research: more than 20 interviews with 35 managers, specialists and customers across the operating companies, plus card sorting to learn how users grouped services and which words made sense to them.
- Customer-led information architecture: a site strategy organised around solutions and customer journeys instead of business divisions, with global navigation, content strategy and governance built on the research.
- Reusable components: page types, content components, campaign and call-to-action patterns, and search, metadata and SEO structures, responsive across desktop and mobile.
- Migration and distributed publishing: content prepared and migrated into Episerver, a publishing model for central and business-area teams, and analytics requirements for evaluating individual content assets.
- Interactive calculators: tools that let visitors assess real operational requirements early in the buying process, including a Panama and Suez toll calculator.
- A platform built to change: an ongoing product-development model run through a roadmap and prioritised backlog, so the site could follow acquisitions, integrations and separations.
Impact
One in four toll-calculator users asked to talk to Wilhelmsen. Calculator users viewed six pages per session, against three across the wider site, and visitor retention rose tenfold.
The whole site worked harder. After launch, homepage bounce rate fell by more than half and time on site rose significantly.
One company, not a collection of divisions. Customers saw a single maritime services company with connected solutions, and every business area published from a common foundation.
A website organised by org chart answers the question the company asks about itself. Customers arrive with a different question.
Led the strategy, design and delivery of Wilhelmsen's global digital platform while at Making Waves (later NoA Ignite). The wider programme involved a multidisciplinary team; this case study reflects individual contributions. Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
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