Our Website Journey: A Year in the Making (Part 2)

Getting to the How

In case you missed it, Fisher Technology launched our revitalized website December 2021 with the sole purpose of giving existing and potential customers and partners the opportunity to get to know the real us. It was crucial to break down our extensive knowledge surrounding BPA platform and divide it into simple sub pages that allow visitors to find exactly what they need without having to sift through information that may not be as pertinent to them at that moment.

But why go through this? Why go from almost?40 pages?to?only?9?

“It's been a year since our marketing team brainstormed the first ideas, designs, and ultimately the direction we wanted to take our brand in and with the finished product in our hands, one of the best feelings is being able to look back at all the achievements, challenges, and highlights of building our website and telling a story from the ground up...” -?Kiara Walker

Our previous website followed industry standards?at the time which consisted of cramped, text-heavy pages made rather than the breathable, template style of layouts we see today. Back then, our goal was to work on using SEO to bring in more traffic?to the website and grow our audience by incorporating many landing pages which were targeted by SEOs key search terms ranking our pages higher.?Since then expectations, SEO best practices and design elements have changed to focus on being more content driven with simpler, yet eye catching elements. Now, design techniques such as including plenty of white-space, a cohesive color palette, utilizing relevant CTA's, and a responsive design that can adjust to a multitude of devices.

The Power of Storytelling

Originally, websites were geared to deliver information and have since been transformed to tell stories that visitors can resonate with.

We know what our product is capable of but really showing our audience how intuitive it is was something we originally lacked. To just to find a specific piece of content on our old website would result in clicking through about five to six pages of noise before getting to what you needed, this became a top priority. Tackling and completely revamping the content you see on our new site in tern making it easier to find the information you need.

Opportunities:

Redeveloping our website allowed us to take the time to assess?what needed improvement. Then we worked on turning?mistakes into strengths we can build?upon as Fisher Technology continues to grow.??One of the major issues we faced on our previous site was something our team likes to call “feature dumping.” whereby the previous pages listed how the software accomplished the integration on a technical level. It meant that there was a clear lack of information on what tooling was built into BPA and the services that Fisher Technology offered that helped us stand out amongst our competitors.

The Approach:?

Part 1: Condensing

I wanted our new website to fully tell the story of Fisher Technology and how far it has come in the last 16 years. I spent weeks gathering ideas on layout design, figuring out the best way to display content, narrowing down how many pages we wanted to have on the site, and condensing years of information into key points that would best help our customers and?partners navigate to find exactly what they were looking for.

Part 2: Visualization

I was a bit nervous at first but more excited to build our website from the ground up and give Fisher Technology a fresh look and feel. Once I gathered enough ideas on how I wanted the website to look, I then took the next few weeks drafting potential page layouts via InDesign and incorporating techniques I had researched.

(InDesign Page Layouts)

We wanted to take an innovative approach to the website by incorporating visuals to help us tell our story. On the previous version we realized how heavy the text was and wanted to circumvent our content. From the beginning of this journey, we wanted to include animations that gave our audience a visual gateway into key pillars of BPA Platform such as how the notifications and alerts function works and demonstrate how simple that process was just from the palm of your hands.

It was also important for us to give the face of Fisher Technology a familiar, but updated look, hence why we took the time to revamp the one and only- Penny Process.

Penny originally served as our HubSpot bot that lived on our previous website, but Joel and I decided to make her truly part of our team. I took time out from designing pages and turned to finding Penny Process and updated look. One of the inspirations I grew fond of was Lilly from the AT&T commercials and how we could use that styling in our own way.

We ended up going with the classic Fisher purple polo shirt and sky-blue slacks. My favorite part of Penny was deciding what hair color to give her and ending up with her iconic blue and purple ombre look as well as her pink aviator framed glasses to complete her look.?

Why we chose to step away from a HubSpot Site – the search for the right partner?

It was so insightful to be able to have the opportunity to connect with Chris Vendelli and the team at StudioPFG. They were extremely helpful when it came to the execution of the website, and we worked with them to take my website drafts and rewritten content and translate it to the finalized product we see today. In switching to Studio Vendilli, we gained access to a range of prebuilt widgets and tools that allowed us to fully customize our website just as we wanted. In HubSpot, the user-interface for editing the website left much to be desired and often presented more challenges than solutions. However, being able to live edit and publish on the fly are key things that sold us in partnering with Chris and his team.

You can check out Studio Vendilli?here.

They were?incredibly helpful in walking us through the site tools and sharing tips on how to truly make it our own when it comes time to maintain and update the website as we continually grow. It was like being on the behind-the-scenes tour of a feature film and seeing all the intricacies of what it takes to build the sets and go over lines before the curtain rises before your audience.?

In the next part of this series, I'll cover my key learning experiences, initial success of our website as well as what's next for Fisher Technology.