Hovis

Transforming the digital presence of one of Britain’s oldest and most iconic FMCG brands

First established in 1886, Hovis is a household name up and down the country.

As part of a wider brand refresh and marketing strategy, Hovis appointed JBi to design a new, state-of-the-art website with an uplifted look and feel.

Hovis felt that their website’s UX and performance could be optimised, and wanted more emphasis to be placed on their brand identity and values. They also wanted to prioritise the improvement of bounce rates, dwell times and overall traffic.

The main objective for the new website was to capture the company’s rich British history and heritage while making it stand out amongst competitors with strong UX, high performance and engaging, interactive features.

UX-focused Discovery phase to explore stakeholder objectives and define key user journeys

A priority for this project from the beginning was to ensure that Hovis’ new website was built with a full understanding of the company’s objectives and to ensure that it satisfied the needs of its many stakeholders and target audiences. While the website would primarily need to serve their customers, it also needed to cater to a range of users including potential stockists and career applicants.

In order to fulfil this, we began the project with a collaborative Discovery phase.

This 4-week process began with a series of stakeholder interviews, which helped us to build a strong understanding of the aspirations that each of Hovis’ teams had for the new website, from marketing and branding to careers and the HR department.

From there, we carried out a comprehensive analysis of competitor and benchmark sites, qualitative and quantitative user research, put together a detailed SEO audit and explored Hovis’ current systems architecture in order to ensure that we improved the technical set up of their website.

Visualising Hovis: A Dynamic Journey through History and Heritage

Hovis was keen to reflect its rich history and heritage on the website in a highly visual way.

The JBi team visited the History of Advertising Museum and led creative workshops to explore Hovis’ visual history.

We then proposed a dynamic timeline of the company’s history, with high interactivity and engaging visuals.

A mixture of historical advertising and contemporary digital design was subsequently used to bring Hovis’ heritage to life within a dynamic, parallaxing timeline..You can view the Our Story page here..

Building Hovis’s new website on a secure, sustainable and future proof platform

We decided that the best way to achieve this would be to build the site on Drupal 8.

As an open source CMS, we were able to custom code the back end in order to tailor it to Hovis’ needs and ensure that it is as intuitive and easy to use as possible.

The JBi team continues to support Hovis as new versions of Drupal are released and proactive updates are required, including version upgrades.