Bayer CropScience
Redevelopment of Bayer CropScience UK websiteBayer CropScience's website was generally regarded as the most popular and most informative website of any UK agrichemical company. The key focus for Bayer’s web redesign was to make the site ‘plain english’, since the site was to be targeted directly at farmers and not 'technical experts'. Combined with the writing style, the pages were configured to be quick to scan, with a limited depth of information, so that  farmers could quickly get an overview of each product, and then dig deeper to see how best to use the products, or read up on the more technical aspects of each chemical. In keeping with the simple, plain English philosophy, an interactive weed spotter was created that has proved to be the most popular element of the site. Additionally, a secure area for invited arable farmers was required, to be run solely by a Bayer representative. This meant that as well as building the secure section of the site, a tool was built so that farmers applying to join could then be ‘approved’ or ‘declined’ by the Bayer handler via the extranet. Further tools were added within the extranet: -
a random monthly prize draw, with the number of entries per member based around the number of site visits logged each month -
all registered members have competition or other form-based pages pre-filled with their contact details -
an interactive slug data tool SlugWatch (below), that allowed Bayer technical staff to enter slug populations via the extranet, and for farmers to see any sudden rises in slug populations in their local area, all within a Flash-driven interactive map of the UK. (sadly no longer available)  Additionally, the site needed to conform to all Accessibility guidelines. To this end, the main programmer designed the site code to use CSS and this enabled the site to run as a text-only site, or with differing contrasting font/ background colours. Apart from the Accessibility benefits, this also has benefits in terms of search engine indexing and also being able to run from PDAs and Windows Mobile, where download speed is more critical than graphics. Finally, with over 1000 pages live on the site, a vast number of regular users and very high number of site visits per year, it was critical that a decent web stats package was implemented combined with custom reports built to track specific requests. All reports can be viewed online, as well as exported out to Word, Excel and PDF so that these can then be distributed internally to prove the success or otherwise of various competitions, e-marketing promotions and print advertising links.
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