The Customer
The Multihull Company (TMC) was started in 1999 with a specialization in the yacht services industry on multihull boats. The company is headquartered in Charleston, SC with offices and brokers around the world.
The Challenge
With a busy growing business, The Multihull Company had an old, and inefficient website. It did not display their massive inventory well, it was difficult to keep updated, and it was riddled with technical errors. Colophon was tasked with designing a new website that represented the brand well, and provided a powerful set of content management tools to allow the site to scale. A primary goal of the redesign was to showcase the yacht inventory and allow brokers to collect leads and store them in their company CRM
The Solution
Colophon first undertook an inventory of existing assets. All of the legacy website files were collected and analyzed in order to gather important content that would need to be migrated to the new website. Next, new assets, supplied by TMC, were collected and prepared for use in the new project.
A new website "theme" was designed, and programmed for The Multihull Company.
Boat inventory is supplied by YachtWorld, and the legacy website used a simple, and unattractive framing solution that is supplied by YachtWorld. YachtWorld is a global industry standard MLS for the inventory, as allows syndication of boats for sale across the YachtWorld family of website, and in other brokers who co-broker used boats. Colophon worked with the YachtWorld API to take the data directly and use it in an efficient display system that is also connected with their Brokers data. The system works by running a regular syncing routine.
TMC use the YachtWorld system to load all of their boat inventory, and their new website checks for updates on a regular schedule. The service also syncs to a second stream of data the includes boats form other companies that are co-brokered.
The Technology