Equus Software

Equus Software Web Site Redesign

Time Frame:

2018 – Present

Team:

Dawn Barnhart – UX, UI, Visual Design
Mandy Hawkes – Marketing Director / Stakeholder
Copywriting – John Riley Associates
Custom Development – John Russell

Tools:

Description:

Equus Software Corporate Web Site: 2013-2018

The site as it was when I joined the company was a very rigid, template-based setup on a proprietary platform. The marketing staff could only edit the carousel on the home page, add blog posts and job postings. Every instance of other changes required sending work orders to the agency that had designed and built the site. This was excessively costly as there were many rounds of edits each for each request to ensure what the marketing staff wanted was accomplished. Even adding a landing page required the agencys’ assistance. The marketing staff was eager to add Hubspot to the site to gain a more in-depth understanding of sales opportunities and to implement a CRM system. The quoted cost to add this to the site was excessive, as well.

Challenge:

The site was very hard to use; required a lot of searching for content and hid a lot of information in obscure ways. The site suffered from an SEO standpoint, as well. Its overall design had also not aged well.

Solution:

I offered to redesign and rebuild the site to achieve the business needs more fully. I sourced several persons for the hire of a copywriter as the company needed to re-visit the content for updating purposes, wanted to add additional content, images, graphics, and video. I worked with the copywriter and began re-architecting the site in parallel. After a few iterations, the company leadership, marketing director and I finalized the architecture. I began working on the wires for the page layouts—adjusting as required.

As part of the new site backend, an internal WYSIWYG was also built-in so non-technical marketing staff would be able to easily update, add or re-arrange content of any type.

Outcome:

The site was launched in July of 2018. The internal system has been very well received—the new external design has as well. The time spent on updating the site for conferences, new content, updating or adding videos has been cut from weeks to hours. The cost of the new hosting and maintenance is a fraction of the previous site.

Hubspot has been implemented and can be tweaked, pages can be added, styled and new content can easily be added as needed.