Carroll Fuel

Carroll Fuel was founded in 1907 as a coal and wood distribution company. In the proceeding 100+ years it has grown to beyond what the founders could have imagined. By the year 200 the company expanded beyond its original offerings and was it was segmented into 5 unique business divisions, residential HVAC, commercial HVAC, heating oil sales, gas station fuel distribution, and bulk fuel transportation. The companies brand presence was just as fractured. 5 Separate websites were haphazardly used as destinations customers, prospects and clients. The sites contained duplicate pages, linked to one another without taking into account the larger brand user experience visitors were receiving. Airplane Corporation won the contract to rethink and revamp Carroll Fuel's user experience.

The project started with mapping the current sites and pages. Below is a snapshot of our hand drawn map showing just how inter-tangled the sites had become over the years.

Carroll Initial IA

Through carful analysis of Carroll's service offerings we were able to streamline its public presence to 4 main offerings, home services, commercial services, gas station servies and a section containing top level corporate information. An interesting finding was that many of the home service offering offerings and equipment, and commercial commercial service offerings and equipment did overlap. Rather than duplicating pages or managing two different sites when a piece of equipment was changed we developed what we called 'vaults'. These vaults housed information, that is managed in one location, and is dynamically pulled into appropriate pages using.

Here is the final IA.

Carroll Final IA