Cal-West’s old website was 8 years old and the overall design and layout showed that. The website had issues with speed, was not consistent in formatting, had a poor user experience, and was not easy to update by the client. Additionally, Cal-West was struggling to get a high ranking for their new San Rafael location. Cal-West needed a website that showcased their long-standing history as a personal and trustworthy company for over 50 decades. They also needed a way to properly showcase the quality of their considerably large rental inventory, a way to easily maintain that catalog, and a way to give visitors the ability to request a rental quote. Finally, Cal-West wanted a simple and streamlined way for their current clients to see their active and closed invoices and make payments online.
We’ve worked on many API integrations in the past and the integration into Alert’s rental software is one of the larger projects we’ve tackled. Alert’s API allowed us to automatically pull current rental prices from Cal-West’s internal database. This feature ensures that the rental rates on Cal-West’s website are always up to date with the data being automatically updated nightly. Cal-West’s quote requests are automatically sent into Alert’s database where Cal-West’s staff can review and convert into a quote or reservation. The final component of the API integration was the customer portal where Cal-West’s clients can view their open and closed rental invoices and send payments online on invoices due.
Cal-West’s new website features a streamlined way to collect new rental quotes, and highly improved online rental catalog that is uniform and easy to navigate. The old rental catalog had all sorts of different formatting for each rental item which made finding information difficult and presented a less than professional image for the company. The new catalog is uniform and has an improved layout that showcases the rental images in a larger and easier to see format. The entire add to quote functionality has been rebuilt in a way that is intuitive and familiar which increases the total number of quote requests submitted.
As with most of our website designs, Cal-West’s website was a custom design. WordPress was the best choice for this project. We used WordPress’s database and custom post types for the rental catalog inventory and BLOG. Using WordPress allows Cal-West to easily update and maintain their BLOG and rental catalog through the WordPress administrative dashboard. Our custom WordPress theme was made totally from scratch and features the latest design features for mobile responsiveness and large screen formats. Having total control over the layout allowed us to create a home page that is geared towards the needs of their target market, putting the most relevant and commonly utilized information front and center for easy access.
The website redesign projected was started in response to Cal-West’s new San Rafael location being opened. After two months of the new location being on the old website, the keywords for the new location were still not being triggered in the San Rafael area. The old website was not properly optimized for search engines in general but was especially lacking in optimization for dual locations. We reworked page content, and link structure to help ensure that tool rental keywords are ranking in both locations. The new website is around 4x faster than the old website which is part of the keyword ranking algorithm.
Cal-West Tool Rentals has a website that properly represents the quality of their rental equipment while showcasing the company’s long-standing reputation of being trustworthy and well-respected since 1958. The new website is now properly set up for two locations to receive high SEO keyword rankings and has greatly improved the ability for high keyword rankings for the new location which was struggling to gain traction in Google/Bing. By focusing on creating a consistent format, that was mobile smart, for all the rental items we improved the overall user experience which increases the number of quote requests sent through the website. Additionally, we completely rebuilt the customer portal which was difficult to navigate. Now Cal-West’s clients have quick and easy access to all their open and closed invoices with the ability to pay invoices online.
