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We are just days away from releasing a new company website. I am testing out the user experience from my side of things, and I am very excited about the upcoming release. The past two years, our team members have been evaluating different sites to determine and capture an experience that we believe clients will really like.
Here are some of the areas that were really eye-opening for me.
Content
We took our existing content and made it much more accessible and more user-friendly. Also, we added supportive content that customers had been asking for.
Search
Users have many options when it comes to searching for items on the site. People accessing the site can search for a particular test method, resource, submittal form, analysis price.
Speed
It is much faster than our current site, and it is optimized for mobile. This is huge. Without this piece, we would still be miles away from a really great site. It is amazing the work that can occur to optimize a site for speed.
Fewer Clicks
Clients can get places in a logical way with fewer clicks. We will always be refining and retuning this site for this function, but we are starting at a much better place.
Looks much different
We wanted a site that looked much different than our previous site, and it was developed in a way that it cannot be compared with our other competitors. This was another area that we really looked at. How many Apple competitors have similar looking sites? Can you think of a company that has a similar site to Amazon? These companies understand what it takes to “stand out in a crowd.”
Major oversite
One area I really overlooked was the I really thought the effort to integrate a new website with our current client log-on portal pages. I was hoping to upgrade the look of some of our internal pages that had not been changed for years. I quickly learned that making changes to these legacy systems would be a challenging task because of many items: older processes, older coding, old integrations. As a result, this process has been delayed and will not be available at the same time the new website rolls out.
More work ahead
Looking back, this move was probably way overdue. Moving to a much better web experience was critical. The process does not stop here. Websites are evolving. I would not be surprised to see the whole website experience be reshaped again in the next five years.
Through this process, we were able to get to a new starting point with which to build on. The site has been optimized, and we can now focus on driving the experience forward rather than spending our time on resolving issues with the site. Our company is in a much better place
Good news, our company is in a much better place today than we were before.
