A persona-led rebuild that cut ITMA's bounce rate 23%
The challenge
With live events frozen through the pandemic, ITMA needed to keep the global textile-machinery community engaged online and sustain interest in the industry through a post-COVID reset. The previous website worked against that. It was dated, hard to navigate and not built for mobile, so first impressions undersold an organisation at the centre of its field.
Acquisition was low. Visitors faced a long path from the homepage to whatever they had actually come for, and the site struggled to serve three very different audiences, exhibitors, visitors and media, from the same shallow structure.
One site, three journeys
Our response ran on two tracks: a UX and design rebuild on top of a technical integration layer. On the experience side, we mapped distinct journeys for each of the three audiences and used them to shorten the route from landing to the content that mattered, rebuilt the navigation to cut clicks, and shipped a fresh, fully responsive design with profile creation over SSO and GDPR-compliant data handling. A flexible, client-managed CMS meant ITMA's own team could publish without waiting on us.
Underneath, we built five system integrations so the whole thing behaved as one product: IPTech as the single source of truth feeding exhibitor data into the CMS, Ingenico for payments, Jublia for event and exhibitor management, Salesforce for marketing, and the venue's own ticketing and payment system. It runs on Kentico .NET, hosted and managed by Construct on Azure.
The payoff
Measured like-for-like against the old site, January to June 2019 versus the same window in 2023, the rebuild moved every number in the right direction: bounce rate down, sessions longer, organic audience up, and average keyword position climbing more than five places once Search Console had data to track against.
The Results
A site that finally reflected the organisation
Campaign Assets
The Creative Work
