Symbol.com (Now a division of Motorola)
Live Oak Helps Transform Website into a Successful Launch
The Challenge
Symbol Technologies (now a division of Motorola) is in the business of enterprise mobility, which is a fancy way of saying that its solutions empower workers to make real-time, on-the-spot decisions -- regardless of physical location. To achieve this, Motorola packages technologies like bar code scanning, radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless local-area networks (WLAN) and point-of-sale computing for customers including logistics providers, retailers, utilities, manufacturers and government.
However, the previous symbol.com was not nearly as flexible or dynamic as its mobility solutions.
For starters, the site's architecture was rigid and unforgiving. All changes to the site's content had to be performed manually. "Every time Motorola needed to make a change to the website, they had to send the changes to a third-party production company and write new code," explains Andy Meadows, president of Live Oak 360. Consequently, updates were slow, expensive and prone to human errors.
What’s more, the site's search engine didn't employ logical scoring. "If you were looking for documents by product name, the most relevant documents might be listed on page three of the results," says Meadows.
Despite its earlier shortcomings, Symbol.com is strategically important to the company. After all, the website serves as a prime lead-generation tool. Hundreds of Motorola partners -- including system integrators, software companies and technology consultants -- refer clients to Motorola's site. The site offers rich educational resources including white papers, case studies and product training. Customers can even go to symbol.com to order spare parts, download software drivers and obtain other product support.
The Solution
Motorola turned to FG SQUARED, an interactive marketing company, to spearhead the website overhaul. FG SQUARED handled creative design, project management, and strategy for symbol.com but relied on Live Oak 360 to rebuild the site's architecture and software engine.
To enable Motorola administrators to easily update site content themselves, Live Oak created a customized content-management tool that lets administrators easily stage and publish changes. To allow for more targeted, dynamic content, Live Oak created a special layer between the content and the underlying architecture. This decoupled design means that customized content can automatically be displayed based on an individual user's browsing history and page views. For example, if a user is looking at a page for a particular bar-code scanner, links to white papers, graphic images, articles and case studies involving the bar-code scanner might appear in the right column.
Live Oak also designed a more powerful search engine -- using the open-source Lucene search framework from the Apache Foundation -- to provide search results sorted by relevancy.
Visitors to the site can now subscribe to RSS feeds, enabling them to receive updates of industry news items that interest them.
The Benefits
In the months since Live Oak re-architected and relaunched Symbol.com, the website has delivered increased value to administrators and site visitors alike.
"With the content-management tools, Motorola now has full control over what it publishes," reports Meadows. "Administrators no longer have to rely on an outside production company to make simple changes. This means they spend less time and money on production and can focus more on evolving the site's features and functionality."
"We've had good feedback about the site's usability and navigation," adds Meadows. Dynamic content presentation, a better search engine and RSS feeds ensure that the website is more relevant to visitors.
Symbol Technologies was recently acquired by Motorola, so the names are changing. But the website continues to be a strategic asset for the business -- and a symbol of marketing success.
