George L. Throop Company

From Local Building Materials to National Expert Concrete Producers

ATC Web Solutions started the Throop Company with their first website in 1994. Since that time there have been multiple revisions of their website incorporating their changing business in the process. The “proof-in-the-pudding” was that they were hired by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1996 to do the first ever Nuclear Waste Tank Closure in the United States at the Savanna River Site in South Carolina. Always having a web presence, and improving the website periodically throughout the years, has continued to be an advantage and has helped them to expand their concrete production business throughout the United States.

About the George L. Throop Company

The George L. Throop Company started in 1921 as a building materials company. That company continues today. As a 100-year old family-owned company the Throop Company has learned how to adjust to changing times. In addition to the building materials retail store in Pasadena, the Throop Company is also a concrete producing company. They create unusual and unique concrete mix designs as well as producing normal concrete mix designs using their custom designed volumetric mobile concrete portable batch plants. They specialize in a lightweight Cellular foam concrete. Their mobile portable batch plants allow them to do small or big jobs without producing unneeded concrete. They produce Rapid Set cement (hardens in about an hour) used for city streets, freeways and airports where down time is critical. They also produce special and unique cement concrete grouts.

Challenge

The Throop Company had no website in 1994 but neither did many other businesses. They were motivated to have a website because they wanted to reach beyond Southern California and the best way to expand their business was to reach people online. They wanted to go beyond being just a building materials company and grow as a concrete producer using mobile batch plants.

Solution

From 1994 until today, the Throop Company has had 5 websites all built by ATC Web Solutions (except for one). Since they already had their logo, we worked together laying out how the website should be organized. With each new website revamp we went through the exercise of incorporating how the company had changed into the menu and adding or deleting web pages. In the world of construction, fashion does not change much and neither does big equipment so images haven’t changed much over time. Over the years, each redesign of the website reflected the changes in the business from a building materials company to a concrete producer using mobile batch plants. The first website was HTML, the second was HTML and CSS, the third was a Flash website and the current website is on an upgraded WordPress template. We also moved the site to SSL for better security and SEO ranking.

All of the websites were developed on dev sites and then moved into production in a reasonable amount of time.

Results

When the Throop website was launched in the mid-1990’s, they were found online in 1996 by the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. They were ultimately hired by the U.S. Department of Energy to do the first ever Nuclear Waste Tank Closure in the United States. That alone paid for the cost of the website. Over the years the Throop Company built up their expertise as a high-producing specialty concrete producer and they have now produced hundreds of thousands of yards of specialty concrete all over the United States. In 2018 the site was moved to https:// (SSL) for better security and to help it rank higher on Google.

The Throop Company online presence continues as a specialty concrete producer getting found by prospective customers and returning customers. The small business owner in the construction industry usually does not have much of a web presence and by having a website before their competition and sometimes a better website than their bigger competitors – the throop.com website has been their greatest marketing tool. ATC Web Solutions also added them to Google Maps and Google Business. They can be found more easily and have control over how they want to present their business.