The Situation

McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Singapore in 1979 at Liat Towers! On that day they sold the world’s highest volume of hamburgers. Today, over 120 McDonald's restaurants across the island serve 55 million customers yearly in country that has a population of little over 4 million people.

With the global branding campaign of i’m lovin’ it back in 2003 still fresh on everybody’s mind, an urgent face-lift to the existing web site was needed. The site did not represent McDonald’s current brand image in anyway and Ad.WRIGHT were awarded the honour of a re-vamp.

The Challenge

With the main McDonald’s headquarters in the USA and managing the main global web site, a solid brand identity was already firmly established on-line.

Supporting country franchises that we felt were up holding and following the McDonald’s brand guidelines were the UK and Hong Kong web sites. So our challenge began by finding what we felt had succeeded in the various sites, looking at both usability and search engine success.

Following this, the site had to be updateable and easy to manage, taking in to consideration that it was likely that every page would end up with a different flash banner and content layout.

The Solution

We decided on a hybrid of flash and CMS (content management system) to cover both the interactivity needed to support the various brand messages. And HTML for the main content and site links so it would make it easier for the search engines to index. The design evolved following closely to the 3 country sites, and a feature set was developed to assist the easy updating of the site for key areas such as the ‘restaurant locator’.

SEO (search engine optimisation) was also a priority of the site this was made more challenging with the need to have the higher level site links in the flash banners. To over come this and to keep the site manageable, we generated xml from the CMS and the xml was used for Google’s site map feature allowing us to punch in to Google every page from the new McDonald’s web site for correct indexing.

The Result

The web site was delivered on time within 2 months and with the Ad.WRIGHT teams’ passion for the project we managed to produce over 200 pages and 120 plus flash banners including additional copywriting. A testament to our in house capability and competency in getting the job done. The McDonald’s web site ranks around number 3 (at Googles discretion) when searching for ‘McDonalds’ within Singapore, top 2 sites are always the main USA brand site.

The site was an immediate success with traffic and stickiness doubling, while repeat visits also grew from the activity of the island wide McDelivery service, now easily accessible in the new web site. The feedback system was also a success giving McDonald’s customers a valuable channel of communication.

With a mixture of flash and html the site was able to up hold and promote the brand values from headquarters while still running local week to week promotions and value added service such as their new McCafe and McDonald’s reward system.

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Testimonial

We have finally reached the close of the website development process (phase 1), and can look forward to the official launch of the www.mcdonalds.com.sg website on 30 April 2006.

At this point, I would like to sincerely thank you and your team for the professional consultancy, dedication and sheer hard work, in delivering a website that McDonald’s Singapore can be proud of. Feedback from my management team and colleagues has been very positive, and I hope you are as encouraged as I am.

You have proven to be our reliable working partners, since the project first kicked off in February. Through the past two months of intense work pace, I have certainly enjoyed working with both of you as we raced against time to pull this website off the ground. I am hopeful that we can lift the website to even greater heights in the future.

Best regards,

LINDA MING

Senior Communications Manager
McDonald’s Restaurants