About the Brand
Pat O’Brien’s Bar is an internationally renowned entertainment establishment located on Bourbon Street in the heart of the New Orleans French Quarter.
The bar is known for its famous Hurricane drinks, garden patio, and piano bar entertainment. Pat O’Brien’s is over 75 years old, and has franchise locations in Orlando, San Antonio, Cancun, and Destin. Each franchise has the authority to make decisions regarding marketing, events, food menus, catering, and communications for their location.
The Opportunity
Pat O’Brien’s Bar’s old website was a dated design that was difficult for users to navigate, laborious to update, and it made incorporating the franchise locations difficult. This dated design made it difficult for most search engines to querying the site’s content for relative and useful information. Thus, web surfers who Google or Yahoo Pat O’Brien’s various locations would find it difficult to track down the bar’s online presence.
The Challenge
Pat O’Brien’s leadership desired a fresh website design representative of the energy and fun generated by its signature bars. The new design would better promote the online store while increasing customer interest and involvement with the brand. In addition, Pat O’Brien’s desired to integrate the new website into a targeted web-based brand communications system. This system would allow customers to become more connected to their favorite locations, while providing means for the Pat O’s team to reach their loyal fan-base with event invitations and special notices.
Design the Planet’s Solution
Design the Planet designed and built a website that captured the bar’s legacy and spirit, while showcasing the online store and dramatically improving the ease of navigating the site. The new website design incorporated communication elements to foster Pat O’s online community through opt-ins, Flickr photo sharing, a Facebook profile, and other social-media marketing techniques. The website’s structure was optimized for search engine friendliness, was hand-listed with the major search engines using strategically devised search terms and phrases, and other proprietary web marketing methods were applied to ensure a successful website launch. The new website was unveiled on December 3, 2008 in conjunction with the celebration of Pat O’Brien’s Bar’s 75th Anniversary and Block Party.
The Results
Patrons of the legendary New Orleans bar have praised the new website design, and site visitation time lengths have dramatically increased. Web site visitors are staying on the website longer, and are viewing more of the site’s pages in comparison to the old website design. In the 30 days before the website redesign, 17,497 visitors viewed 3.9 pages of the website, and spent 1:41 minutes on the website. In the 30 days after the redesign, 18,539 unique visitors viewed 5.5 pages and spent an average of 2:39 minutes on the website, including more visits to the online store than before.
This resulted in 1.6 more pages being viewed by each visitor, and an increase of 48 seconds longer viewing time by visitors to the website. In addition to the site’s increased ability to retain the interest of unique visitors, the bounce rate (which is the percentage of visitors that leave the website after only surfing the homepage) dropped from 37% to 25%. This seems to suggest the new website design attracts more unique visitors and compels them to stay longer, and to do more on the website while there. This drop in the bounce rate is handicapped, however, because the new design delivers news and promotion details on the homepage, rather than making site visitors navigate further into the site just to retrieve basic info about events, planning or catering. Also, Pat O’Brien’s Bar received over 400 unique email opt-in entries in the first month following the launch of their redesigned website.
| Old Website Design | New Website Design | |
| Unique Visitors | 17,497 visits | 18,539 visits |
| Pages Per Visit | 3.9 pages | 5.5 pages |
| Time on Website | 1:41 minutes | 2:39 minutes |
| Bounce Rate | 37% | 25% |
| Email Sign-up | 10-15 per month | 432 in 1 month |
Given the challenging recession currently being faced by the U.S. economy, web site sales from the new Pat O’s website remained constant through the 2008 holiday season as compared with the previous rolling three year sales cycles.
Testimonial
“Pat O’s finally has a website that reflects the caliber of your fine establishment.” – Pat O’s Customer
“I am very happy with our new site. The team at Design the Planet understands our concept and continues to accurately convey and apply our brand image to the website. Our new site is fun and creative, and our customers can easily navigate through out.”
Shelly O.W. – Vice President of Administration – Pat O’Brien’s Bar
