Company / Client
Role
Tools & Applications
In early 2020, our marketing at Sojern decided to tackle updating the 4-year old site. Sojern is constantly evolving their business to fit the needs of the ever-changing travel market. We put together a strategy to tackle this project. Despite careful planning, there were a number of adjustments along the way.
From 2017-2020, the previous design was very much inline with our brand. However, the organization had changed so much and the user experience was slow and muddled. It was very difficult for users to find the content they needed or direct them to ultimately connect with our sales team.
Before laying down any design, we needed to understand what we wanted our website and create the best possible experience for customers, prospects, and our own employees. Our website needed to reflect how we've grown as a company. Another goal of the project was to transform the website into a demand generation tool. Sojern.com will serve to convert visits to the website to effective marketing automated qualified leads (MAQLs).
Rebuild sojern.com to reflect Sojern's current business offerings and transform it into a demand generation tool.
Our team had to address the content and the design and we tackled it in a couple different ways through interviews and research. The team worked with current clients, and the sales and exec teams to understand what is our messaging that needed to be on the site. I also researched an presented examples of B2B sites that we wanted to emulate.
In order to better serve our customers and prospects, we found that dividing the site into 3 main sections:
I put together this visual flow for our company to help convey how user will navigate the new site. As we developed the site, we did receive more feedback and the flow slowly evolved.
Starting with the homepage, I worked through different sections of the site building out wireframes in Sketch for approval, and then developing high-res mockups which was uploaded to Invision. I prototyped the site using Invision's tools to share with the company.
The visual design relied heavily on the branding that I had already built out over the past 4 years. The main change was pulling back away from the orange and introducing more of our secondary palette as well as utilizing our brand gradient. Like the B2B sites that I had researched, we pared down some of the larger images and removed the animation in order to improve the overall functionality of the site.
This was the most experience I've had so far working directly with a developer to execute my design. We decide to work with an external developer to build out a completely new theme within Wordpress rather than start from a template. This will improve the page speed of our site. This also was a chance me to utilize my understanding of HTML and CSS to properly communicate my vision or if I needed to make any small changes without him. I greatly value this experience.
