Website Update – October 27

This month we began Phase 2 of our website continuous improvement project. With our focus on improving the user experience, continuing to migrate brand sites from PIM, supporting key business objectives and preparing our infrastructure for future upgrades, the team has been busy. We have accomplishments to report, updates to provide and news to share.

Site Migrations
Work on the new websites for our Healthcare Lighting® and RELOC® brands is in progress, and those migrations should be completed within the next few weeks. Work is also under way for the Holophane® brand’s new website, a very large project that will follow Healthcare and RELOC.

Improvements
The search tool on the Acuity Brands website is now able to provide results even when the search term is typed inaccurately or incompletely. For instance, if you use an incorrect spelling or leave off a letter or two at the end, the search function will automatically return results for what it determines the correct query would be.

A soon-to-be-completed improvement is the default opening of certain filters on product category pages. The filters that will automatically open — typically a “top five” — are ones that have been determined to be the most commonly used or otherwise most appropriate ones to help you quickly narrow results for that category. And the filters will stay open as you make your selections, rather than automatically closing.

We continue to work on the product search function that allows results boosting, which is meant to have the most relevant and popular filters and attributes appear first. We have applied this function to some of the brand sites, but we’re experiencing data issues that cause skewed results, so this project is still a work in progress while those issues are being resolved.

Work also continues on an overhaul of the navigation on the Acuity Brands site. Improvements will include an expanded list of product categories in the drop-down menu to help users more easily find what they need.

And on the Lithonia Lighting® brand’s website, we have added new code that will allow the use of custom, “smart” calls to action (CTAs) on those web pages.

Backlog
As you probably know by now, we use a two-week sprint cycle for our web work, roughly dividing each month into two sprints. We ended our first sprint for October with 147 jobs closed and 157 in backlog. The second sprint for October will conclude at the end of the month.

As always, we greatly appreciate your input regarding our websites and ask that you continue to provide your suggestions. Send feedback or meeting requests to kathy.wendorf@acuitybrands.com.
Thank you,

The Acuity Brands Web Team