Taking a bold new direction with a corporate website redesign for a global leader in architectural project management software.
In 2017 Newforma underwent significant personnel changes at the management level. Soon after the new management team acclimated themselves within the international company, changes began rolling through the organisation from the top down. Leaner and ready to rebrand, Newforma contacted our Toronto web design company several months in advance of their rebranding initiative to discuss working together and begin building a website design strategy.
Following several initial meetings and conversations about the new direction for the project management software company our team prepared an initial project scope and laid the groundwork for the discovery and strategy work that would follow.
Establishing Website Design Goals
- Total branding overhaul – as the foundation of any business, the core branding and logo design is paramount to its ability to market itself and be memorable. Newforma first fine-tuned their logo design and colour palette before we explored the complete branding overhaul to refocus the website design and online presence.
- A total website redesign – our initial strategy work reshaped the overhaul navigational and user experience for the corporate website design. Through this initial groundwork, the new interface design and engaging user experience unfolded naturally through our tight-knit collaboration.
- WordPress development – to deliver a seamless experience throughout Newforma’s target markets around the world, we developed a custom WordPress multi-site with language support for English North America, France and Germany. The custom deployment allows Newforma to self-manage all languages under one central content management system.
Our Web Design for SaaS Process
Discovery and Strategy
The best place to start discovery is with the client. Our web design company relies on a kick-off questionnaire that we’ve developed and fine-tuned over the years. The survey is designed to allow our creative team insight into the history of our client’s business, as well as their future vision and brand marketing plans. As our clients progress through the kick-off questionnaire, we also present them with a series of questions that are designed to discreetly allow the reader a break from the more serious discussion and think of themselves and their business as everyday items, such as a shoe, or type of car. These questions are particularly relevant to our discovery as they give us a unique perspective on how our clients envision their business and themselves on a very personal level. The information we collect helps form the creative direction to follow later on in the project.
Another critical element to our discovery work is website analytics. Most businesses now have Google Analytics installed, but for those that do not, we often install the tracking code before commencing the project to enable our professional website designers to understand who is currently using the existing website, how they’re finding it and what information they’re accessing the most within the website. The analytics data offers us a pretty accurate look at how the current website design is performing both in terms of user experience and organic search.
Following our initial discovery work, we move into our website design strategy phase. Using a combination of our web design experience and information collected during our discovery phase we begin building a new sitemap. The sitemap functions as a visual representation for our clients to understand where each page in the new website design will live, but also how everything is connected and where we’ve identified shortcomings in the current website experience and how we intend to correct them.
With sitemap approval, we move on to wireframe design as the next stage in our website design strategy phase. During wireframing, we begin to develop an initial blueprint for the new website architecture and page layouts. Referring to our discovery and earlier strategy work we begin to determine the new user flow and conversion strategy that will drive the new website’s success rate. This step in our strategy phase is where the excitement often begins to build for our clients as they start seeing the new website take shape. The website wireframes are loaded into our prototyping platform allowing both our team and our clients to experience the redesigned navigational experience as well as markup the layouts with sketches, comments and collaborative discussion.
