Applied Vision Baseball left a coaching site for a store that shows gear working.

Applied Vision Baseball make vision and swing-mechanics trainers (strobe glasses, reaction lights, swing locks) designed by players who use them. The coaching content around the equipment had already done the hard part. Coaches knew the name, recommended the gear by model, and sent their hitters off to find it. Demand was arriving without being bought.

What those hitters found was a content site with the products several clicks inside it.

Navigation built for someone reading a drill article was asking a buyer to browse like a reader. The two audiences wanted different things from the same menu, and the buyer was the one losing. A recommendation is a short window and it was closing in the navigation.

The obvious fix was a tidier catalogue page. It would not have worked, because none of this equipment explains itself in a photograph. Strobe glasses look like sunglasses. A swing lock looks like a strap. Every recommendation a coach made was landing on a page that could not confirm it.

Every product page opens on the equipment being used, not on a studio shot of it sitting still. The demonstration leads, the specification follows, and the price sits with the specification. A cheaper build would have led with a rotating hero banner, which is the one thing that tells a visitor nothing about what a swing lock does.

On a phone the clip is the first thing on screen and it plays without sound, because a hitter checking a recommendation is often somewhere they cannot listen. Below it, a short block answers the questions that used to arrive by email. Nothing else competes for the first screen, and the reading material stays where the readers are.

The storefront runs on Shopify with a custom Liquid theme built around video rather than around a photograph. Media is compressed and served per device, so a demonstration can lead the page without costing the page its speed. Product data is structured so that a model name, its training category and its age guidance can all be filtered on.

The footage we had was coaching footage, shot to teach rather than to sell. Waiting for a product shoot would have cost more time than the launch had, and the season was coming. So we cut what existed into short silent loops and built the pages around their limits. The shoot happened later, into a store that was already trading.

Structured data and a clean URL structure went in before launch. The new product pages could then earn rankings of their own, instead of borrowing from the content site. GA4, Hotjar and Search Console were connected on day one. The team can add a product themselves, which keeps the catalogue moving without developer time.