Value City New Jersey Launches Redesigned Web Site

October 14, 2008  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on October 2008 Value City Furniture of New Jersey went live Tuesday on its a newly redesigned website, www.valuecitynj.com . Web site and Internet marketing services provider FurnitureDealer.net developed the second-generation site, which displays more than 12,000 products from 33 leading manufacturers of case goods and upholstered furniture, and a full line of mattresses.

In addition to relevant content, Dayton, N.J.-based Value City wanted a more contemporary look and feel for its Web site, said Manager Mitch Keller in a release.

“To be relevant to our target audience of style-conscious women, our website has to be fashionable. So we updated the look and feel, using trendy colors,” Keller said. Contemporary lifestyle photos and promotional events feature more prominently on the redesigned site.

The second goal of the new design was to increase usability.

“The only negative comments we heard from customers about our old Web site was information overload. The new design is less cluttered, more streamlined. All the information is still there, just not all at once,” said Keller.

Andy Bernstein, president of FurnitureDealer.net, said the new Web site includes a clean layout to reduce confusion and innovative, two-stage menus to help users get quickly from whatever page they’re on to any other page on the website.

“Intuitive navigation controls are important because 55 percent of visitors to Value City’s Web site enter from search engines to pages other than the home page,” Bernstein said.

Growing Internet usage, especially among Value City’s target audience of women between 30- and 50-years-old, while usage of newspapers, make the retailer’s Web site a valuable advertising tool.

“Shifting advertising dollars from traditional media to the Web makes sense in this down economy,” said Keller. “Our Web site is very search-engine friendly, so our site is usually found by furniture shoppers in the markets we serve who use search engines to find the products and brands we carry. Since we generate so much site traffic without having to pay for online advertising, our Web site has become our primary branding vehicle.”

Value City has seven stores that feature a wide variety of name brand furniture at affordable prices serving the entire state of New Jersey, Staten Island and parts of Pennsylvania, offering interior design and floor planning assistance.

FurnitureDealer.net has 40 clients, including 15 of the 150 largest independent furniture retailers in North America. The company helps implement multi-channel strategies for furniture retailers and manufacturers that promote sales through retail stores and salespeople; builds Web sites and provides product content management, search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, sales training and in-store integration.