website redesign

THE CHALLENGE

This Northern Michigan community bank sought a redesign of its website to better represent the Bank’s corporate brand, provide an intuitive user experience for its key audiences, and adhere to ADA Compliance (Level AA) standards. Galapagos was charged with delivering a visually-appealing website, crafting relevant and engaging product and service content, and adhering to stringent security and compliance requirements for hosting and content management. The Bank asked that Galapagos consult on the selection of a hosting provider, reviewing the Bank’s stringent compliance requirements and identifying vendors that could meet and exceed those requirements. Additionally, Galapagos was tasked with simplifying the process for website maintenance by utilizing a content management system (CMS) that allowed the Bank’s internal users to quickly make text edits to website content and deploy them to their live site.


THE GOAL
Produce a customer-facing website that could essentially function as a branch for the Bank: provide intuitive opportunities for self-service functions – such as ordering checks or applying for loans – while presenting an exceptional user experience for prospects, customers, and employees.


THE APPROACH

  • Conduct internal analysis to define objectives and goals, perform competitive analysis, and thoroughly review and evaluate existing website content.

  • Review and confirm CMS, hosting environment, and back-end functionality requirements for the website.

  • Define architecture and navigation to guide the design of the user interface and template layouts.

  • Build the website and load all copy and image content. Engage compliance for a thorough review of the website and business lines for quality assurance.

  • A successful launch of the website took place in September – a proud accomplishment for the Bank’s internal project team and for Galapagos.

THE RESULTS

The newly designed website was well-received by the Bank’s internal users and customers, alike. It features contemporary design and an improved on-page experience. Importantly, its ADA-compliant design ensures the website provides an inclusive and accessible user-experience. An added benefit, the Bank’s internal user groups tasked with maintaining the website’s content following launch have found the Craft CMS platform allows them to more swiftly make changes to content, such as rate updates.