MeisterWerke Schulte GmbH
Online relaunch on the international stage
sitegeist worked with MeisterWerke's marketing team to conceive, design and implement a restructured, responsive and optimized website that meets all contemporary search and usability requirements.
A Brand is Trust
American branding expert Walter Landor put it succinctly: “A brand is trust.” This same brand philosophy lies at the heart of MEISTER: the brand must embody maximum credibility in everything it communicates. Especially for premium brands that command a fair price for outstanding products—and thereby provide strong margins for specialist retailers—credibility is essential.
MeisterWerke is an innovative company with a rich tradition. It began as a small carpentry workshop with just four employees. Today, around 650 people work at the company’s headquarters in Rüthen-Meiste, extracting the best from the raw material wood to manufacture flooring products that are valued around the world.
MEISTER is a high-quality, forward-thinking brand with a wide product range for the timber and building materials trade. For many years, the brand has stood for exceptional product quality. MEISTER floors, panels, and accessories are especially popular across Europe with professional craftsmen who rely on them every day.
Product and Consultation Expertise – Now Online
We’ve now extended this trust into the digital space, establishing a brand with a clear and distinctive profile online—because today’s customers rightly expect a high level of product and consultation expertise. And that’s now available not only through specialist retailers, but also directly to quality-conscious end customers.
For the premium flooring manufacturer, sitegeist has developed a new online presence that showcases the brand and its product range in a truly distinctive way—making complex, highly customizable products like laminate, parquet, resilient flooring and accessories fully experienceable in the digital realm.
Challenges and Objectives
The previous website primarily functioned as a database-driven online product catalog—a result of the company’s historical B2B focus on specialist retailers who handled both consultation and sales.
However, as end customers increasingly conduct their own online research, the role of the retailer in the purchasing decision continues to diminish. Like many other brand manufacturers, it is now crucial for MEISTER to actively engage with the awareness and consideration stages in the upper funnel of the customer journey.
Our primary task, therefore, was to create a new and holistic digital brand experience that clearly differentiates MEISTER from its competitors and ensures strong recognition among the target audience. The project’s goal was to increase brand visibility among consumers by improving the site’s organic search ranking, thereby driving lead generation—all while maintaining existing SEO performance.
A particularly complex technical challenge was ensuring that the site could be accessed in five languages across nine European markets, resulting in 45 page variants per piece of content. Previously, this made even minor updates highly time-consuming for editors—an issue the new solution has now streamlined significantly.
Strategy, Concept, and Development
At the outset of the collaboration, we conducted a scoping workshop with all stakeholders on site. The goal was to establish a shared understanding of the challenges to solve, define the key target markets and audiences, identify meaningful success metrics, and clarify all relevant project constraints.
Together with the client, we refined the core project brief, assessed the current offerings of competitors, and analyzed the unique characteristics, advantages, and limitations of those solutions.
The team then developed design and functionality criteria, looking for ways to clearly differentiate the new website from competitors. Working in an iterative process, we defined and prioritized a roadmap for implementing the chosen concept.
When aiming to deliver an outstanding customer experience, a holistic view of the customer journey is essential. The new structure was developed collaboratively and transparently, making it comprehensible and meaningful to all workshop participants. The new meister.com was designed to guide users from inspiration to purchase, with three main entry points to reflect key stages of the journey:
- A magazine section for those seeking inspiration
- A consultation area with extensive how-to content for DIY users
- A product catalog for users with specific purchasing intent
Following this, we began developing a prototype that would allow for an interactive experience of the concept in its early form. To build a strong content strategy, we created detailed buyer personas, enabling the production of highly relevant content that supports lead generation at various phases of the customer journey.
Additionally, we supported content development with a data-driven keyword strategy to define pages and content areas, with special attention paid to semantic content modeling to ensure strong search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
The Result
Together with the marketing team at MeisterWerke, sitegeist developed a restructured, responsive, and optimized website that meets modern standards in search performance and usability.
One of the key challenges in the flooring industry is the extended purchase decision cycle, which can span three to six months. During this period, MEISTER now provides optimal online support for prospective customers through in-depth product knowledge and editorially curated content across the entire product range — all readily accessible through a dedicated magazine section.
New content categories and a streamlined navigation system help users find targeted information on products available through professional retailers. An integrated dealer locator on every page makes it easy to identify the nearest point of sale.
For those who prefer a hands-on approach, the site offers informative videos and step-by-step tutorials — for example, how to install parquet flooring or how to distinguish between different types of flooring materials. These resources help DIY users gain confidence in selecting the right product for their project. Practical tips for cleaning, maintenance, and repair are also included to ensure long-term product satisfaction.
Search Functionality for Fast-Track Users
By reducing the number of pages, we have improved maintainability for the editor and at the same time simplified Google crawling. The handling of hreflang markup was improved for the different language variants and a separate xml sitemap was created for each.
Lazy loading and gzip were used, among other things, to improve the performance of the site, and responsive images are used to deliver images that fit the viewport. This ensures a lower data volume, saves file size and therefore loading time.
But there were also many improvements for MeisterWerke's internal marketing team in their daily work with the Content Management System Neos. The import of specialist retailers has been revised and the product import has been improved so that the process is now incremental and automated. In addition, a reporting function has been implemented so that any discrepancies can be quickly identified and rectified.
The page structure based on a component library has created a construction kit that allows editors to put together and change numerous page and content variants very flexibly with just a few clicks. This means that in future, editorially configurable, dynamic landing pages can be created very quickly. These basic components can also be used for other brand pages and the new overall appearance of the MeisterWerke company.
The heart of meister.com is undoubtedly the elaborately programmed search filter, which allows users to select from a large number of soils in just a few moments. At the same time, the editor can preset this filter according to context and thus only display suitable products for the respective topic area .
The new edition of the meister.com website has been online since the beginning of October 2019, and the work is already paying off after just a few months. We are currently recording an average of over 35,000 new visitors per month. That is a significant increase of 160%, which we are very pleased about.
