A 55-Year-Old Electrical Rep Gets a Website That Finally Matches the Team
Grissinger-Johnson Sales has represented the biggest names in electrical and datacomm equipment since 1971. Their team knows the products, specs, and Upper Midwest market better than almost anyone. Their website did not mention any of that. It was hand-coded HTML on an outdated platform, with features quietly stopping to work, making it difficult for structured search engines and AI assistants to read. We rebuilt the entire site from the ground up on WordPress, restructured around how buyers actually search, and gave every client its own discoverable home on the web.
What We Did at a Glance
Audited the legacy site with GJsales leadership to decide what to keep, what to cut, and what was missing entirely
Rebuilt the full website from scratch on WordPress into a modern, secure, scalable platform
Restructured the information architecture and navigation around buyer intent, not legacy page order
Constructed a dedicated landing page for each manufacturer represented, turning a logo wall into 19 indexable, AI-readable pages
Optimized the entire site for traditional search and next-gen AI answer engines
The Challenge
A Respected 55-Year-Old Company with a Website Stuck in a Previous Decade.
We have worked with GJsales for years, beginning with taking over management of a website we did not build, and keeping it running long past the point where the underlying code was doing them any favors. That arrangement had its success. However, as AI-powered search began reshaping how buyers, specifiers, and contractors find suppliers, the gap between the company GJsales is and the one their website portrayed became impossible to ignore.
Here was a third-generation business led by Joe Quinn, Tom Quinn, and Jay Scott, representing 19 leading manufacturers across a five-state territory, presented through a site that looked and behaved like it was built for a different era of the internet. Maintenance had reached its limit. The site did not need another patch. It needed a rebuild.
What Was Holding Them Back
Aging Hand-Coded Foundation: The website was built on basic HTML with no content management layer. This meant even the tiniest of updates required a developer, making the codebase every year harder to maintain.
Broken and Unreliable Features: Several site functions had stopped working correctly over time. This included the kind of quiet failures that erode credibility with a first-time visitor who has three other reps in other browser tabs.
Outdated, Unsupported Platform: The underlying platform was no longer actively maintained, forming a real long-term security exposure for a business whose partners and distributors rely on it.
Invisible Manufacturer Lineup: The manufacturers GJsales represents (their single strongest search asset) lived as a flat wall of logos with nothing for a search engine or an AI assistant to index, attribute, or cite.
Navigation Built Around History, Not Intent: Menu structure reflected how the site had grown over time rather than how a distributor, contractor, or specifier actually looks for a line card or a product spec.
Weak Conversion Signals: Calls to action were sparse and inconsistent. Visitors who were ready to talk to a rep had to go looking for the way to do it.
Not Structured for AI Search: No clean heading hierarchy, thin metadata, minimal internal linking, and no structured entity pages. Lacking were signals AI answer engines depend on to understand and recommend a company.
Our Strategy
We Did Not Just Redesign a Website.
We Rebuilt the Foundation Underneath It.
Every decision came back to three goals: clarity, credibility, and discoverability. In Google and in the AI tools buyers now ask before they ever open a search results page. We started with the people who know the business best, working directly with their executives to review the existing site page by page and decide what earned its place in the new one.
1. Platform: From Hand-Coded HTML to WordPress
We rebuilt the site from the ground up on WordPress, the most widely supported and scalable content platform available. That single decision closed the security gap, ended the developer dependency for routine updates, and provided the client a foundation that can grow with them for the next decade.
Why it matters: The team can now publish news, swap a line card, or add a manufacturer without waiting on anyone.
2. Information Architecture: Organized Around How Buyers Search
The old navigation reflected how the site had accumulated over the years. The new one showcased how a distributor or contractor actually thinks.
New menu: Home · About Us · Manufacturers (Electrical/Datacomm) · News · Meet the Team · Contact Us
Plus a persistent utility menu: Line Cards, with direct PDF downloads for Electrical, Datacomm, and staff contacts
Why it matters: Visitors can predict where every click leads before they make it, and the highest-demand assets, the line cards, are never more than one click away from any page.
3. Manufacturer Pages: Turning a Logo Wall into an Entity Network
This was the highest-leverage change on the project. Instead of 19 logos linking to manufacturers’ websites as soon as visitors arrive on the GJsales’ home page, every manufacturer GJsales represents now has its own dedicated page on GJsales.com: Atkore-Flexicon, Cembre, Hubbell, Littelfuse Powr-Gard, Hammond Power Solutions, ABB Critical, R. Stahl, and the rest.
Why it matters: Someone searching for a specific manufacturer in the Upper Midwest can now land directly on GJsales. Just as important, AI answer engines can parse those pages as clear entity relationships. This company represents these brands, in this territory, which is precisely the structure they need in order to name GJsales in a response.
4. Content and Trust Signals: Show the Expertise, Do Not Just Claim It
We built out the sections that prove the company is active, credentialed, and worth calling.
The GJsales Advantage: trusted partners, regional coverage, expert support, product innovation
Visual territory coverage map for the Upper Midwest service area
News and Resources hub for product announcements and manufacturer highlights
Meet the Team, putting real names and faces behind a relationship-driven business
Prominent, consistent calls to action on every scroll depth of every page
5. AI Search Optimization: Built to Be Read by Machines and People
Being AI-search-friendly is not a setting you toggle on. It is the cumulative result of structure, clarity, and technical hygiene.
Clean semantic heading hierarchy so crawlers and language models can follow the page logic
Descriptive, unique meta titles and descriptions on every page
Purposeful internal linking connecting manufacturers, categories, resources, and contact paths
Fast-loading modern image formats and mobile-first responsive layouts
Plain-language, factually specific copy. The kind AI systems can quote accurately
Results
A Website That Finally Tells the True Story of the Company.
GJsales went from an aging site that undersold a 55-year track record to a modern, lightning-fast, professionally structured digital domain presenting them the way their customers already experience them. The manufacturer lineup is now a discoverable asset instead of a static graphic. Line cards are one click from anywhere. Team members can update their own content. And the whole site is built on a foundation that will still be supported years from now.
Before & After
Legacy site:
Hand-coded HTML · unsupported platform · broken features · 19 logos linking away from the site · buried line cards · minimal CTAs · no AI-readable structure
Redesigned site:
WordPress CMS · fully supported and secure · 19 dedicated manufacturer pages · persistent line card menu · territory coverage map · news hub · team profiles · CTAs on every page · optimized for AI and traditional search
KPIs to Track Post-Launch
Organic sessions to individual manufacturer pages. The clearest signal the entity strategy is working
Line card PDF download volume by document (Electrical, Datacomm, Contacts)
Contact form completion rate and phone click-throughs from mobile
Branded vs. non-branded organic query mix in Google Search Console
Impressions and citations in AI-powered search results and answer engines
Core Web Vitals and mobile page speed scores
Average engagement time on Manufacturers and About Us pages
What This Client Said About ProWeb365
Why ProWeb365?
B2B Websites Built to Be Found, Understood, and Trusted.
The GJsales project is a clear example of how ProWeb365 approaches a website redesign as strategy rather than decoration. We started with the question every B2B site has to answer: would a distributor, contractor, or specifier landing here immediately understand what this company does, who it represents, where it operates, and how to start a conversation? When the answer is no, the visual design is the symptom, the structure is the cause.
For GJsales, that meant rebuilding the platform, restructuring the architecture around buyer intent, converting a static logo wall into a network of indexable manufacturer pages, and optimizing the entire system for a search era where an AI assistant may be the first thing that ever reads your website.
What We Deliver for B2B Companies and Manufacturer Representatives
Modern, Secure Foundations: A supported CMS your team can actually maintain, replacing legacy code that only gets riskier with time.
Intent-Based Architecture: Navigation and page structure built around how your buyers search, not how your site happened to grow.
Entity-Level Discoverability: Dedicated, structured pages for the brands, products, and territories you represent, so both Google and AI answer engines can find and cite you.
Long-Term Partnership: We have supported GJsales for years and we are still an email or a phone call away. That does not change after launch.
Ready for a Website That Matches the Company Behind It?
Your expertise has not stood still. Your website should not either.
Let’s talk.