Red Gold Web Design

Background

Distributing the finest tomato products both nationally and internationally, Red Gold maintains its headquarters in Elwood, IN and distributes products from three processing plants throughout the state.   Red Gold has been producing quality tomato products since 1942; the company remains family owned and has grown to encompass a wide body of brands and products, distributed throughout the world.

Through its four brands—Red Gold, Redpack, Tuttorosso and Sacramento—Red Gold produces premium-quality canned tomatoes and tomato-based products for retail, foodservice, private brands and club stores.  Here are a few fun facts about Red Gold:

• Their warehouses store enough cans to reach the moon and back!
• The company sells 90% of private label ketchup nationally.
• Tuttorosso and Redpack tomato products are the numbers one and two most popular brands in NY.
• Red Gold distributes products in all 50 states and in 16 countries.

Several years ago, Red Gold had a website designed for their family of brands that had served them well.  But the content management system was antiquated, and Red Gold had only limited access to change recipes, and edit a limited amount of existing information.  They could not add pages nor could they access every part of the site to make changes.

They approached BoxCrush to improve their overall design, increase the site’s functionality, and provide a content management system that would be intuitive and comprehensive.  The company needed a complete design overhaul and an enterprise-wide technology upgrade.

Dan Finney, president of BoxCrush explains, “Red Gold’s internal marketing department needed the capability to update the entire site.  They wanted a CMS that would allow them access to every part of the site, while limiting access for certain users.  For example, they wanted foodservice personnel to be able to access and change that portion of the website, while limiting their access to that section only.  The company also wanted the website to be more visually exciting and stimulating, with its four product brands presented in a distinct yet complementary fashion.”

Challenges

The Red Gold website is very robust, encompassing the corporate website and four distinct brands: Red Gold, Redpack, Tuttorosso and Sacramento.  Each brand needed its own look and feel, yet with a cohesive overall design.  BoxCrush chose Sitefinity as the platform for the new web design.  “Red Gold was using Microsoft technologies and Windows servers, so using Sitefinity (which is built on ASP.NET) allowed us to stay in a similar platform.  It also enabled us to provide a great deal of customization to the site.”

Part of the challenge of this website was transferring a large amount of information from one platform to another, without losing search engine rankings in the process.  In all, 168 static pages, 81 news articles, 70 PDFs, 500 recipes, and 140 product descriptions needed to be migrated to the new website, every page with redirects from the old pages URLs to the new URLs to preserve search rank and customer bookmarks. 

In addition to the ability to offer customized modules, Sitefinity was chosen because of its capability to handle news, blogs, image management, videos, documents and forms.  “There was no advantage in this case to using open source technology, because most of the things Red Gold needed had to be custom built anyway,” continued Dan.

Sitefinity also offers a better level of security and granular control over their content.  As mentioned earlier, the company needed multiple people to be able to access the backend of the website, and yet limit that access to certain portions of the website.  Sitefinity has that capability.

“BoxCrush was happy to partner with Red Gold in the rebranding, redevelopment and technology update for their corporate website. The website presented a challenge because of the scope of custom development, as well as the need to differentiate its four distinct brands: Red Gold, Redpack, Tuttorosso and Sacramento,” explained Dan. “We were able to develop a complementary high-end look and feel, while uniquely branding each division. We delivered an enterprise-level content management system that allowed us to customize modules for contests, recipes, products, member areas and foodservice, while delivering Red Gold a user friendly and extremely flexible way to update their own website internally. We are confident that this new website will better serve the entire Red Gold family of products.”

Solution

BoxCrush created the new Red Gold website with a cohesive look and feel, yet with distinct design elements for each of the four brand names—Red Gold, Redpack, Tuttorosso and Sacramento.  When visiting each brand name section on the website, the visitor feels as if they are on a completely different site, with a completely different yet complementary visual design.  Because the four brands are all included in the one umbrella site, the visitor can easily navigate from one brand area to another, exploring Red Gold’s other brands at will.

Red Gold’s home page includes a custom image rotator which gives visitors an introduction to the four distinct brands and enables easy access to brand information. The new site also gives social media more prominence. 

Red Gold’s website required a great deal of customization—for coupons, recipes, members, products, and foodservice.  BoxCrush was able to completely customize those modules to encompass Red Gold’s functionality requirements.

Red Gold has the ability to enter new recipes and edit existing ones with a single login.  The easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface is simple to understand and requires little training.  Ingredients can be inserted and have a click-and-drag feature to change the order.  Products can be entered and used with the recipes. Nutritional information can be entered in to a simple table on the backend and are displayed as a familiar label to visitors.

Even though many of the recipes remained the same from the previous website, BoxCrush improved how the recipes looked and loaded onto the site.  They are more visually appealing, and easier to see on today’s larger monitors. Recipes and products are also cross-referenced throughout the site.  If a visitor is looking at a particular recipe, it will link to the specific products used in that recipe.  Likewise, if the visitor enters a specific product, a list of suggested recipes containing that product is available.

Because of the wide range of products and brands, it was important to allow many people access to the site but to limit access as well.  Red Gold’s internal marketing department now has the ability to access and change every portion of the website, allow specific users to enter certain areas, add or delete pages, etc.  The company wanted total control of their website, and that is what BoxCrush achieved for them with this new redesign.

The previous Red Gold site had a series of Flash animations which the company wanted to migrate to the new platform.  Not only was BoxCrush able to do that, we were also able to incorporate the Flash portions into our new design, adding sitewide navigation links, copy, and links to videos that was not present in the original Flash animation.  And, because many people access the site through mobile applications, BoxCrush customized the site to remove the Flash animation for ease of use by the mobile visitor.