SmartCow Website
2023
SmartCow
When I first joined SmartCow, their website was an area the team was focused on improving. At that time the site had been built by an agency using Prismic, a headless website builder.
This system was extremely limited from a design point of view and our marketing team had an inefficient workflow that involved working directly with our dev team to use off-the-shelf components with reusable fields, reminiscent of most CMS systems.
Seeing these issues and having Web Design Experience, I began to advocate we change our approach to the corporate website.
Design Stage time frame:
3-4 months
Project Type:
Website redesign
Almost the whole design team was involved in the ideation and creation of the design for the new design. We all collaborated to put forward our best ideas to the senior management for feedback.
My primary responsibilities were:
Communicating and coordinating with the marketing team and senior management to ensure the new design was aligned with their expectations.
Facilitating the design process and guiding it to best suit building in WebFlow.
Training the design team and marketing team in the use of WebFlow’s designer and editor features
Developing the WebFlow site
The set-up and managing of the various integrations via Zapier
Team:
Design Team (3)
Marketing Team (2)
Copy/Technical Writer (3)
Pushing for change
Seeing Opportunity
Working to produce some content for the previous website, I quickly realized how limited Prismic was. We had next to no control over the visuals of our website, forced to use off the shelf components and sections
And so, I began to advocate we change our approach to the corporate website.
Why change?
I knew that making such a large change would require complete buy-in from the senior management who had invested in the existing site and so I set about creating a pitch for why we should swap from Prismic to WebFlow.
Issues with Prismic
Very limited design control particularly over how components behaved on mobile.
Requires a lot of engineering work - our Dev team was already under high demand for other projects.
The workflow with Prismic was un-intuitive for our marketing team and also had a steep learning curve for any users.
Advantages of Webflow
Nearly unlimited customisation including ability to design for specific break points.
The design & marketing team could handle the development and updating as WebFlow is a no code tool removing a task from the pressured dev team.
Lots of integrations our marketing team could use.
Building a plan
Getting full buy-in
To ensure that I could convince the senior management that this move would be valuable and worthwhile, I created a plan of how I would tackle the project.
Having extensive experience developing WebFlow websites while freelancing, I was confident I could spearhead the project and deliver it.
Outcomes
Measuring success
The website update became part of a larger push by the company to improve our online presence and lead generation therefore its hard to say the exact part the new website design had to play in the campaigns success. However, here are some of our metrics following the launch of the updated design.
+68%
(1st 6 months)
-37%
Mobile home page bounce rate
(down from 76% to 39%)
+120%
Website form submissions
(30-40% increase in high potential leads)
-100%
Dev Team resources needed for development & upkeep