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 multiple business divisions and a complex service portfolio, whose website reflects the company's organisational structure rather than what customers are actually trying to solve.
The Challenge
Wilhelmsen operated a complex international portfolio spanning marine products, ships agency, ship management, maritime logistics, technical services, training and insurance. Its previous websites largely reflected the structure of the group's companies and divisions rather than the needs of customers. Visitors could see how Wilhelmsen was organised, but it was harder to understand what the company offered, how different services related to one another, or which solution applied to a particular operational need. The group needed a more customer-focused digital platform that could accommodate organisational change, support distributed publishing and contribute more directly to business development.
What We Propose
Customer & Stakeholder Research - More than 20 interviews involving 35 managers, specialists and customers across Wilhelmsen's operating companies, plus card-sorting exercises to understand how users grouped services and which language made sense to them. Customer-Led Information Architecture - Repositioned the site strategy around solutions and customer journeys rather than internal business divisions, with global information architecture, navigation, content strategy and governance built on that research. Reusable Platform Components - Reusable page types, content components, campaign-page and call-to-action patterns, search/metadata/SEO structures, and responsive experiences across desktop and mobile. Content Migration & Distributed Publishing - Content preparation and migration into Episerver, with a distributed publishing model for central and business-area teams, and analytics requirements for evaluating individual content assets. Interactive Calculators & Estimators - Interactive tools letting visitors assess real operational requirements (including a Panama and Suez toll calculator) early in the buying process, creating a natural path toward further engagement. Flexible, Ongoing Platform Model - Designed to remain flexible as Wilhelmsen acquired, integrated or separated businesses, moving into an ongoing product-development model governed through a roadmap and prioritised backlog.
Why It Matters
Bounce rate cut by more than half - The homepage bounce rate fell by more than 50% following launch, with time on site increasing significantly. Interactive tools drove real engagement - Visitors using the Panama and Suez toll calculator viewed six pages per session, compared with three pages across the wider site, and the calculators increased visitor retention by a factor of ten. Measurable sales interest - Twenty-five percent of toll-calculator users indicated that they wanted to contact Wilhelmsen, turning a useful tool directly into sales interest. From org chart to commercial resource - The platform transformed Wilhelmsen's online presence from a representation of its corporate structure into a customer-oriented commercial resource, giving every business area a common publishing foundation.
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