Streamlight's Progress® Sitefinity® - Powered Website Successfully Translates 10 Languages to the Benefit of its International Customers and Global Marketing Efforts
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Industries:
ManufacturingProducts:
SitefinityChallenge
After realizing its website required a major upgrade, flashlight manufacturer Streamlight wanted to give it an overhaul to provide a platform for its many international distributors and customers.
Solution
Upgrade to Progress Sitefinity for improved customer experience, increased usability and site search options; add a PDF generator to Sitefinity to easily create PDF product sheets based on previously translated content.
Result
Pages on Streamlight's website translated into 10 different languages, improving international customer engagement; new site search capability provides users with concise results in their native language; SEO rankings improved in each language.
Full Story
Challenge
For 50 years, Streamlight has been manufacturing flashlights and accessories for law enforcement, military and automotive plants.
Recently, the company was looking to upgrade its CMS, described by Ken Leedom, Director, Information Technology at Streamlight, as "pseudo-customized through a marketing agency." Streamlight's original CMS implementation had numerous roadblocks, including hard-coded widgets that made it challenging to update specific website areas. Leedom estimated that 95% of website maintenance required IT involvement.
However, its biggest roadblock came from needing an improved language-translation tool. Streamlight has many international distributors and customers. As such, the company wants to provide content and product collateral (manuals, descriptions, etc.) in another customer's respective language.
"We wanted to provide quality human translation for our most important content and let Google Translate handle everything else, but the Google Translate widget was being phased out," Leedom recalled. "Early on, Visus worked out a way to use machine-translated content from Lionbridge, in addition to the planned human translations, but it meant having to re-engineer every aspect of the site to manage the translated content."
Streamlight was familiar with Progress® Sitefinity®, and taking note of the capabilities to add on features such as language translator, the company chose the Sitefinity Lionbridge Connector.
Solution
Streamlight began working with Progress Sitefinity partner Visus to upgrade the website. The first item on the project's to-do list was finding a language translator that can be easily implemented with Sitefinity. Lionbridge was found to be the ideal translator tool because of its built-in connector in Sitefinity and the ability to do human and machine translations.
"As Streamlight wanted to expand into global markets, they wanted to be able to speak the language of local distributors and those reviewing their products. When you have Google Translate, it's only translating on a surface level," said Michael Daoud, CEO, Visus. "By translating content through Lionbridge's Sitefinity connector, those pages and content are saved in the database."
Through the Sitefinity Lionbridge Connector, language and translation services are tightly integrated with content creation, editing and provides a cohesive, user-friendly experience. Website visitors and potential customers can translate pages and content with a click of a button and send it to the Lionbridge Connector. in doing so, the translated pages are sent directly back into the Sitefinity database for approval by content managers.
Two additional Sitefinity implementations include a new site search integration and the ability to generate PDFs. The updated site search features the ability to search in different languages to provide better experiences for its international customers. As for the PDF generator, it can quickly produce digital product sheets in additional languages on-demand.
Result
The Streamlight website is capable of translating nine additional languages. Arguably, the biggest compliment Streamlight received about its translated images comes directly from their end users. Many of them are praising Streamlight's website with Leedom mentioning there has been an "absence of complaints."
Integrating language services with content management offers multiple long-term benefits beyond convenience and ease of use. For example, the website is now being crawled and indexed in all supported languages, resulting in a notable uptick in SEO rankings in the language of the respective visitor or customer.
With increased usability and no IT overhead, Streamlight's marketing team and system administrators update the content easily and quickly. Regarding easier functionality, customers across the world are taking note of the site search functions. They can easily find what they need since the backend database has stored translated product information, descriptions and specifications. Whether they are working in a warehouse or police station, Streamlight is now equipped with a website perfectly designed to provide its global customer base with the best possible digital experience.