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A screenshot of the new G&H website homepage, 9 June 2022©️ Private

Prioritizing the customer journey and user experience: the new G&H website

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We have listened to all of them, and recognized that they are ready for a new and improved G&H website that really steps up to that mark.

We have invested significantly in the site, launched Thursday 9 June, and we’re proud to say it incorporates many new developments specifically designed to enhance usability, ease the customer journey from initial information to ongoing contact, and anchor our values as firmly in the words and images we use as in the quality of the products and services we deliver.

So, what changes have we made, why, and how do they paint a clearer, more convincing, and above all more helpful picture of our photonics innovation going forward?

Getting to what’s important, quicker

At the speed of progress in an organization like G&H, we freely admit that keeping customers and other stakeholders informed of new developments can be a challenge (in the past year alone, for example, we have opened an Optical Systems Innovation Hub, built a new Class 1000 cleanroom, and broken new ground in the ruggedization of lens assemblies).

It’s a consequence of working in a business that is constantly striving for, and achieving, continuous improvement, and it’s a nice problem to have.

At the same time, however, each new development generates multiples of information that, over time, tend to demand a smarter way of assembling them, ordering them, presenting them, and making them navigable. Neither G&H, nor photonics as a whole, nor website design, stands still.

The process of enabling website users to find and get to what’s important more quickly is precisely what the new website aims to deliver.

We’ve gone through a comprehensive structural upgrade to ensure new product information and all related assets are available in a timely fashion, that historical or archival product information is accessible where necessary but deprioritized, and that the drill-down journey through the product detail (i.e. from product page to data sheet, say, or blog to related website content) is consistent and reliable - with contact options always within easy reach.

This has ultimately enabled us to do more with less, ensuring that the user’s journey from “aware” to “informed” to “action” is as short and frictionless as possible, rather than delivering a website that looks and feels like a catalogue.

Inevitably, these changes in how information is organized and architected have also enhanced the performance of the site’s search engine, as has the specialist development work we have undertaken to this end, making it possible to search more rapidly for any keyword or phrase across the entire site.

Reader-centric to serve all audiences

One of the things that came out of our stakeholder research was that the complexity of photonics language can be a barrier to understanding for some commercial audiences that do not sit within an expressly technical function.

Equally, however, a company with G&H’s domain expertise naturally has many important audiences in highly technical disciplines, and so the technical detail and vocabulary cannot be lacking.

The new website will tackle this conundrum in a number of ways, ensuring that content is available across a spectrum of reader expertise, with different content types embracing different registers from non-technical to highly specialist.

If you want to get an idea of what non-technical language looks like for a photonics audience, take a look at this highly accessible whitepaper explaining spectral bands for imaging applications.

We’re a diverse business with a diverse workforce and a diverse audience, and in our new website our language will echo and celebrate this.

Dynamic, interactive, personable: a website just like us

With our passion for photonics, our technical expertise, and over 70 years’ industry experience, our teams are enthusiastic, fired-up professionals who build inspiring human relationships with our customers, partners, and prospects – and we wanted the new website to reflect this dynamism, personality, and engagement.

There will be much to come on this front in the future, including expanded video content, more coverage of events, further improvements to products and an even wider selection of content, but we’ve started as we mean to carry on, with a greater focus on imagery and photography.

This reflects the true character of our diverse people, and enables website visitors to make a connection with the immense human expertise that is as core to our values as our manufacturing excellence quality of execution.

Every picture tells a story, and at G&H our new website will involve our audiences in an exciting and world-changing narrative.