Our Approach
Three years ago, we embarked on a web project for GreenStar that resulted in a significant decrease in the website’s bounce rate – from 75% to 58%. This translates to 450 more monthly visitors staying on the site, an achievement we attribute to our commitment to accessibility.
In this project, we placed a strong emphasis on the six facets of user experience (UX): functionality, reliability, usability, convenience, enjoyment, and meaningfulness. This comprehensive approach allowed us to meet several clearly stated goals.
Telling a business’s story is the essence of marketing. Businesses exist on a spectrum of distinctiveness. GreenStar is a unique segment of the market, community-owned and driven by values. How could we use the website to tell this story? It all begins with UX.
Our Process
Discover
During the initial discovery phase, we sync with your team to understand the project’s goals, desired outcomes, and priorities. This includes developing a content strategy, curating a tailored questionnaire, and diving deep into your business model. We believe in open collaboration and provide access to our project management platform, Trello, for real-time visibility into our work, internal communications, and timelines. Our aim is to deliver value, build trust, and empower your organization to take the reigns of your tech.
Design
Our design philosophy revolves around 3 key perspectives – your business objectives, jointly established outcomes, and the user experience.
User experience (UX) shapes lasting perceptions of your brand and encourages engagement. While UX isn’t everything, a website is essentially ineffective without it. A site must load swiftly, perform equally well on mobile/tablet and desktop, be straightforward to understand/use/navigate, be reliable, and leave the visitor fulfilled in their purpose for visiting – this forms the foundation of UX.
Develop
We adopt a lean approach during the development phase, designing live using our suite of tools and CSS. This method saves a significant portion of the budget for discovery, design, data analysis, content strategy, and project management. Our efficient use of pre-made software is one of the key reasons we are able to deliver high quality at a competitive price point.
Delivery
Whether we launch on your server or ours, the website belongs to you. We offer hosting, ongoing maintenance, and content management as per your requirements. We also provide training on content updates and website management, helping to keep ongoing costs low for those with budgetary constraints.
Our Solutions
Adding 5 Years To The Sites Lifetime
One of our notable value additions was transitioning from a stagnant theme to the Avada Framework, the top-selling WordPress product with 400,000 purchases as of March 2018. We execute most web projects on this framework, which is lightweight yet powerful, simplifies content updates, accelerates our process enabling us to allocate our budget elsewhere, and thanks to Avada’s strong ongoing revenue, they can invest in speedy development of the framework. A continually updated framework adds perpetual value to any project.
WordPress is intensifying its focus on JavaScript, which will introduce functionality and features such as swift loading of new pages with sleek animations that maintain the menu bar – creating a seamless user experience. All these can be incorporated in the future with Avada, at no extra cost.
High Return on Investment
We approach every project with the mindset, “How can we maximize the value of each dollar spent?” This mentality is reflected in our project proposal. We prioritize designs based on their potential impact, such as page views and user engagement.
“I was born on a farm and raised with values of up-cycling, budget living, minimalism, and resourcefulness. My father was our mechanic, carpenter, midwife, and for better or worse, barber. I love bringing these values of radically resourceful self-reliance to every project.” – Samantha Foust, Founder of Fresh Ink
Pain-Free
Understanding the demands of running a grocery cooperative, we aimed to minimize GreenStar’s project involvement. We launched a week early, managed content organization, and reduced the need for constant check-ins. Our method of updating content is time-efficient and maintains design integrity, ensuring a smooth, hassle-free experience.
Content Strategy
We believe in the power of content. Effective content understands and speaks to its audience, using language that resonates, entertains, and provides value. We assisted with photography selection, wrote subheadings, and suggested a page dedicated to storytelling and values. Our content strategy was geared toward increasing user engagement and clearly communicating GreenStar’s message.
Business Objectives
Our design choices prioritized the store expansion project, using appealing visuals to encourage member investments. In the first month post-launch, over a hundred newsletter sign-ups were made, bringing more people into the store and spreading awareness. We increased site engagement and created avenues to share GreenStar’s story, values, and mission, effectively supporting their business objectives.
Outcomes
Our project went about as smoothly as any of its size could have, moving forward we have internal growth points and system improvement we plan to take, but all things said and done this project had an excellent outcome.
We are thankful to get to work with the wonderful team at GreenStar, and for our years of work together.
By The Numbers
- 5% lower bounce rate
- 2.75-second avg load time
- 15% more pages viewed per visitor
- 22% more time spent on site per visitor
- Clicks on flyers for sales / events / news up 315%
- Just 15 hours were needed by GreenStar’s team to launch
- 950 page views on the special vote page in the first month
- Content management features that are easy to use and ensure 0 outdated flyers, news updates, or job postings
- 121 newsletter sign-ups in the first month — which is over a 3,000% increase from website conversions
Testimonials
“Sam! Thank you for a swift and painless re-launch, it looks great… Y’all are AWESOME! thank you, thank you, thank you” – Scott Lawhead, Marketing Manager
“We will absolutely provide a testimonial. Also, Brandon [general manager] sent me an email yesterday saying how amazing and easy to navigate the new website was and I told him I’d pass the praises on to you.” – Alexis Alexander, Marketing Assistant Manager
“I checked it out and it looks great, with many new features that improve navigatability, ease and focused attention.” – Diane Hamilton, Human Resources