In 2000, Chicago Web Design, Inc. received an inquiry form on our web site from a light bulb catalog company in East Chicago, Indiana called Gray Supply Company. The company was in a unique position. They didn't need a web site designed, they already had one that looked pretty nice. It was called Topbulb.com, and it marked the re-christening of the company as a bona fide e-commerce venture. The problem was that the site had been very expensive to develop, and the return on investment was not growing rapidly enough.

Topbulb.com was struggling with a couple of things, the cost to keep their website hosted and getting traffic to their site. Chicago Web Design, Inc. realized that Topbulb.com knew their light bulbs. In fact, they had over 240,000 light bulbs in stock and a staff of phone sales representatives who possessed a wealth of knowledge. What their site lacked was traffic. It was up to us to determine the size of the market, and where they fit in it.

Distant Horizon came to the conclusion that it was not the ideas that Topbulb had that cost so much, it was that they had hired a company that was accustomed to building web sites for Fortune 500 companies, and had a fee structure to match. We urged them to take a step back, and reduce costs by hosting with a smaller company. We also eliminated nine unnecessary vendors and consultants.

The first step we took to improve traffic was to use Bid-For-Placement to get Topbulb.com placed in the top of the search results for all their most important keywords. Starting with about 30 words and ending up with 1400 words, we were on the front line as the early bid-for-placement brokers cut the deals that controlled top positions on all the major search engines. We saw that there was a direct relationship between search engine spending and orders coming in.

As we were continuing to increase visitor traffic, the client requested that we also help them stay connected to their existing customers. We used HTML broadcast e-mails to offer promotions and sophisticated tracking mechanisms to measure response in addition to Web Trends and bid-for-placement reports. We developed more sophisticated "Referrer Tracking" and "PromoID" systems. This correlated web log data with ordering behavior on the web site allowing us to zero in very precisely on the promotional origin of purchasing customers.

Distant Horizon took over hosting and reduced the monthly cost for Topbulb by two-thirds. We proposed flat-fee prices for the desired enhancements to the site, and began completing them one at a time. Working with Distant Horizon resulted in less coast-to-coast conference calls and fewer layers of project management; the overall process was more efficient. Eliminating the nine vendors also cut costs for Topbulb by 66% overnight.