Just the word “redesign” can be overwhelming. Maybe your first thought is “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” and that’s understandable. But how do you know it isn’t broken? There are many different factors you can attribute poor performance to, but in our experience, web design often finds itself at the center of a lot of critical issues.
Web design is about more than just how pretty your site looks — it encompasses psychological cues, the user experience and your brand messaging. And the site itself has to be easily manageable. If any one of these elements is off balance, it can turn what should be a business-generating machine into a burden on the entire organization.
CereCore, a healthcare IT services firm, was facing exactly this problem. Their website wasn’t generating the results they wanted, their messaging was confusing, visibility to visitor metrics was non-existent, and executing changes was a chore. In February 2021, we started our engagement with them with a website blueprint and messaging workshop that set the stage for a full website redesign and moving their site from WordPress to HubSpot.
Challenges
The heart of CereCore’s website woes was found in its messaging and navigation. Much of their web copy was wordy and dated, which was contributing to a high bounce rate on their site and confusion among their potential audience. People couldn’t quickly identify the problems CereCore solved, so they’d look somewhere else.
They also noted that users couldn’t find the information they needed on their website. When people would come to their site in search of a specific page or service, they struggled to navigate there quickly. The pages weren’t logically organized and many of them were nested within subcategories that were difficult to find.
With these challenges in mind, we prescribed a website redesign and messaging overhaul so the design and copy could work together to ease users’ frustrations and improve site performance.
Course of Action
The redesign started with a website blueprint to help our designers and CereCore understand what pages they needed and how the site hierarchy would be laid out.
“For design, it was a lot of cleaning, organizing and simplifying,” says Shelby Arnett, Senior UX/UI Designer, who worked on the project. “We wanted to really make sure their brand was honed in.”
She continues that the bulk of the project, however, wasn’t just in the page layout. There was also significant design and development work put into building two robust filtering systems. One was for CereCore’s public resources (blogs, case studies, etc.) and the other was for a gated resource center that acted as their MEDITECH demonstration library.
The gated resource center utilized the membership and private content features within HubSpot’s content management system (CMS), which requires users to have login credentials to access certain pages. Users with an approved subscription to this area of the website could access a knowledge base and video demonstrations of CereCore’s own MEDITECH test instance, easily filterable via a sidebar menu with collapsible options. This allowed CereCore to compile important resources and product updates in one place for this user community, while keeping proprietary information gated from competitors.
As design and development worked diligently to create a more cohesive website, our copywriter was focused on using the StoryBrand framework to develop a messaging strategy that was clear, concise and compelling. Once he determined how the brand should communicate their value to clients, the two sides of this web project came together.
Our design team pulled the copywriter into both the site mapping and user flow meetings to ensure the website design matched the messaging strategy. “It gets someone who’s already deeply ingrained in that messaging in on the design process,” Shelby explains. “They can help make sure that the page layout makes sense, that we’re telling a story from top to bottom, keeping it simple and concise so it’s easy to understand.”
After the foundational work and messaging was finalized, our design and development team moved on to the next phase: building the website.
The Build
CereCore’s previous site was hosted on WordPress, but they were already using HubSpot for their marketing. We helped them migrate and build their site in HubSpot so all of their efforts were in one place. This allowed us to take full advantage of HubSpot’s web builder and other tools during the build process.
“It took a couple of tries to take all of their services and organize them in a way that made sense,” Shelby notes. “We wanted to make sure that we created the most logical hierarchy for users.”
The team started with the main navigation — finding a way to compile all of the website’s information into one area with a clear path for users. With CereCore’s help and expert direction, we knocked down their extensive service listings to 5 main categories:
- Application services
- Support services
- IT Infrastructure and Data services
- Advisory services
- Staffing services
The first two of these service categories included subcategories in the main navigation so it was easy for users to go directly to the information needed from the homepage.
The rest of the main navigation bar reflected the overall site structure and pulled out information categorically, making it easier for users to find what they need as soon as they enter the site.
Next, our team turned their attention to the two resource centers. “These were slightly different from each other but needed similar solutions from both the design and development perspective,” Shelby says. “The filtering systems were development heavy with a lot of time spent figuring out the organizational structure of the information. We had to make lots of consolidation decisions before we actually designed the look of that page.”
The final product for the public resource center is fairly straightforward from a user perspective. There are checkboxes on the left side of the main page that allow users to filter by specific content types and topics. The gated resource center has more advanced features, including a search bar, filtering options and subcategories.
After seven months of planning, messaging, designing and developing, the new website went live at the start of September 2021.
Results
CereCore started seeing improvements in key metrics quickly after launching their new site. These results are a comparison of the three months prior to their engagement with us (Nov. 2020 – Feb. 2021) and the three months after we published the redesigned website (Oct. 2021 – Jan. 2022).
After the site was launched, total page views increased 27.7% from their pre-engagement levels. Homepage views increased by nearly 7,000 and new pages recorded anywhere between 300 - 1,300 views in the three-month period post-launch.
In addition to total page views, unique page views also improved after the redesign. They increased by 8.9% and included significant gains in previously not viewed pages. People also started entering the website through pages other than the homepage, which was primarily the only point of entry on the original site. Overall entrances to the site increased by 18.7%.
CereCore also saw benefits from their revised messaging strategy and new web copy in their bounce rate. One problem they came to us with was that their site had a high bounce rate and wasn’t retaining users because they couldn’t find what they needed or understand what CereCore offered. After the redesign and new copy was implemented, the bounce rate for the site declined by 12.7% overall.
Beyond the Website
CereCore’s website redesign not only helped them generate more traffic but also keep those users on the site because it was easier to find and understand the information they needed. CereCore’s team continues to leverage visitor insights to increase the impact of the website. Year over year results yielded a 54% increase in lead conversions from the website and a 58% increase in average read time. Not to mention the ease of adding new content, landing pages, and more.
After the success of their new website, CereCore continued their engagement with us for another year. We helped them with multiple projects, including:
- HubSpot Health Assessment & Portal Cleanup to analyze their current HubSpot portal and Salesforce integration and find areas to clean and maintain data hygiene.
- Creating a branded Vidyard page to deliver branded videos to their audience.
- Building a UK-based website to create an international version of their website for their international expansion.
- Creating a podcast feed for their website to introduce The CereCore Podcast to their online audience.
Is your website underperforming? It might be time for a redesign. Diving into a website project is a big commitment (and investment), so to help you start thinking about what you’d need, check out our blog about custom vs. templated websites.
