After eight years of business and a low marketing budget, AssetBuilder realized it had reached the brink of its viral coefficient. It needed to reinvest money into marketing and lead generation, reinvent our brand, and reduce our reliance on Scott Burns.
As the creative director, I led the team in getting an outside opinion on our services. We hired The Richards Group (TRG), one of the best agencies in America, to help us gain a new perspective and increase the awareness of our service product.
Setting up the Structure.
TRG started out with a review of our current site and our competitors. After an exhaustive study they made 106 recommendations to increase the lead generation of our site. These recommendations ranged from removing the blocks fromour old logo to predictive searching based on our reader’s previous reading history.
I worked with their strategy team to narrow down the 106 recommendations to 60, creating a more manageable list which my development team could complete in three months or less.
Building from Scratch
While reviewing the wire-frames and initial design specification and planning for a future application; our development team decided the best course of action was to split the front-end from the back-end. This would allow us the flexibility for the integration of upcoming applications, but also help us break up the site into more manageable modules.
We dropped almost the entire code base we had used for the past six years and we rebuilt the site from the ground up using a RESTFUL back-end consumed by a Angular JS front-end. We wanted more control over our graphs and charts, so we revamped our entire charting system using a custom coded D3 implementation.
Changing Focus
My responsibilities changed dramatically during this project. While I have always been in charge of the creative direction and front end development, the new specifications required me to learn Angular, D3, and promise/request patterns.
It was a large learning curve and our development team of two was able to rebuild the entire code base in less than three months. While my main focus was on the front-end development, I also continued to design and build out the remaining templates that were not part of the scope for TRG and made sure the site was responsive.
Home Page
Who are we
Portfolio Layout
Article Layout
Subtle Animations
One thing I wanted to focus on was giving the viewer a more pleasant stay at the AssetBuilder site by including subtle animation on each page. Nothing to slow the user down or get in the way, but enough to grab their attention.
Built for Boomers
AssetBuilder’s target market is the Baby Boomers. More and more Boomers are leaving the comfort of large desktops and searching the Internet on their tablets. After watching our tablet viewership grow 30% in one year, I wanted to make sure version 6.0 worked on tablets as well as a desktop.
Instead of working mobile first, I worked on all screens at once. If an idea didn't work on any screen we went back to the drawing board and started over. I also made an emphasis on building features to help our older clients with reading and understanding the site.
Some of the newer features built for Boomers included larger type sizes across the site, easy AJAX based searching, a type increase/decrease button, easier online sign up, reducing the amount of clicks for finding your portfolio, and increasing white space for easier scanning of the site.
- Strategy: The Richards Group, Zack Davis
- Design: Luis Acevedo, Zack Davis
- Front-end: Zack Davis
- Back-end: Mark Johnson
Thanks for Reading
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