The new stylish and sleek ROUSH Performance Magento site was launched last month, giving a fresh look to an established eCommerce organization. The Human Element team worked in partnership with ROUSH to create an efficient, user-friendly experience that represents the ROUSH image. Human Element first identified the primary goals of the project: improving the user experience and stabilizing the site.
ROUSH Industries, Inc. employs more than 1,800 people and operates facilities in five states, as well as in Mexico and Great Britain. The ROUSH brand enjoys a storied near 50-year history of improving the speed and performance of motor vehicles and American muscle cars. They are known specifically to automotive enthusiasts for providing performance upgrades to Ford favorites like the Mustang and F-150. In 2017, ROUSH kicked off their new Magento website build with another development team. After some glitches in the project, ROUSH turned to Human Element to finish their new site and provide guidance for best practices in Magento.
“We appreciate the hard work and attention paid by the Human Element team throughout the launch process and have greatly enjoyed working with them,” said Aimee Hillebrand, ROUSH eCommerce and Online Marketing Manager. “Their expertise in Magento was invaluable to making the process smooth and successful. We look forward to the months ahead as we work together to discover even more ways of growing ROUSH Performance.”
Here are just a few highlights of the improvements made to launch the site:
Cloud Migration
The former ROUSH hosting offered limited support and deployment options. The teams collaborated to migrate the site to the new Google Cloud Platform through Clear Object. In addition to resolving the existing deployment and support issues, the new production hosting server is an exact replica of the staging site from server size to RAM, and utilizes the same load balancer technology as the staging site giving both consistency and speed to the development team.
User Experience
The previous ROUSH site carried the weight of the brand’s traffic, but some user-facing functions were found to be lacking, specifically around the navigation. Although they did have a basic navigation in place to assist the user through their shopping journey, it didn’t have the critical element that ROUSH and Human Element determined absolutely necessary for the new site: A year-make-model feature that allowed the user to filter products specifically fitting their vehicle. Human Element built this feature using an existing product attribute in the ROUSH admin that contained Year, Make, and Model information, but not in a usable format. Human Element created scripts to parse that data and display it on the frontend of the site as filterable attributes in the “Year-Make-Model” feature. The filter automatically reloads the page once an attribute is selected and displays parts as the user makes their selections.
Other Favorite Features
The ROUSH site has a ton of other great features that we love. The ROUSH Heritage page tells the long, vibrant history of the ROUSH company. The ROUSH Dealer Search will take you right to the closest ROUSH parts or vehicle dealership. The robust product page design offers a clean user experience, and details on installation and shipping, beautiful imagery, and related products. Overall, Human Element is proud of the quality of the site, and the little details that make it stand out.
Project Reflections
Both Human Element and ROUSH considered the launch of the new site a success, and over the course of the project built a lasting professional relationship. “We’re proud to be affiliated with a brand that has such a deep history in the automotive sector and a pillar of the eCommerce community,” said Human Element Managing Partner, Ben Lorenz. “We are happy to have had the opportunity to deliver a project to our long-standing client and friend, ROUSH Performance, that will meet the needs of their customers.”
But the work doesn’t stop now! Moving forward, Human Element will continue to work with the ROUSH team to iterate on the site, delivering updates and new features that will keep the eCommerce store trending and profitable. In the coming months, Human Element will be making a handful of frontend improvements to the year-make-model extension and continue to harden the site to protect the overall security. We will also be making some backend improvements to existing extensions like Avalara’s AvaTax and their ERP integration with PeopleSoft. What comes next, only time will tell!
