Web Design for Financial Institutions

XMC Mortgage Corporation

Launch website

All case studies

Web Design Services

Corporate Branding
UX (User Experience) Design
Information Architecture
Responsive Website Design
Art Direction & Consulting

Platform

Custom WordPress Development
Custom Website Development
GEO-location Services
Financial Calculator Development
Search Engine Optimization

Project Overview

Revamping an established mortgage services brand and website into a trusted financial partner for Canadian families nationwide to lean on to make confident, informed decisions for their financial health.

A digital rebranding and reimagined website design for a Canadian financial institution, XMC Mortgage Corporation.

After undergoing a significant corporate rebrand, XMC hired our Toronto web design company to provide a detailed online analysis of their existing web presence and website design strategy to transition the new brand online. Before kicking off our discovery phase, as with all website design and development projects, we worked with XMC to identify the goals and objectives for the project to keep everyone focused going forward and from which we could measure the success of the new website.

Website Design Goals

Corporate rebranding – following the completion of XMC’s logo design project, our primary focus was extending the new branding across all digital corporate communications, including ads, email communications and the website user interface.
Website user interface design – to provide a truly responsive experience online, a contemporary website design interface would be designed to communicate across all devices effectively.
Custom WordPress development – allowing XMC to control content and make daily updates to ever-changing mortgage rates, we opted for a custom WordPress back-end for the new website.
Broker Locator – utilizing geo-location services, we aimed to develop a Broker Locator tool within the new website allowing registered customers to search for and contact XMC-approved mortgage brokers.
Financial Calculators – to provide a trustworthy and complete user experience for potential XMC customers, our skilled web developers would create a series of mortgage calculators to provide up-to-date financial projections to users to make educated decisions about their finances.

Financial Web Design for XMC Mortgage Corporation

Our Web Design for Financial Institutions Process

Website Strategy and Brand Research

Our boutique web design agency in Toronto has been working with financial brands of all kinds for many years. With this extensive experience comes tried and trusted practical knowledge of how to effectively approach web design for financial institutions to not only achieve our client’s goals but also to communicate successfully with their customers.

As with all website design projects, we begin with a creative project kickoff questionnaire to help understand our client’s corporate culture and internal brand views. Our questionnaire extracts the answers and ideas necessary to help translate research into visual design through what may at first seem like silly questions such as “if you were a type of shoe, what would you be?” Ultimately, the answers provided to the questions help form a much clearer perception of the brand.

While our clients complete the questionnaire, our Toronto web designers review the existing website analytics to identify current user challenges and functionality issues to address within the new website design. Additionally, through the review of the user data, our website design team can hand-craft a new website design and interactive experience tailored to a specific audience and technology.

Web Design for Financial Institutions – XMC Mortgage Corp.

Based on our findings throughout the Discovery phase of the project, our next step is to build a website design and development strategy. The first step in our website design strategy is to create a sitemap to identify all pages that will exist on the new website. The site mapping exercise also allows us to tackle any current navigation issues within the old website and make improvements to the navigational experience on the new website.

Following the completion of the sitemap, our web designers and WordPress developers work together to design and build wireframes. The wireframes are a beneficial information architecture design exercise that allows us to map out each unique page layout required within the new website while avoiding the distraction of design, colour and imagery. In doing this, we can quickly and easily make adjustments and revisions to the wireframes as we review and discuss with our client. This practice eliminates additional rounds of changes that are much more time consuming during design, keeping our project budget and timeline in check.

We share the wireframes with our client in an online prototyping tool that allows all stakeholders to login to view and interact with wireframes in context. This tool will enable decision-makers to experience the website strategy in an actual web-based environment so that they can make informed decisions rather than making assumptions based on static images or PDF files.

Responsive Website Design

Mobile-friendly access to your finances.

Website Design for Mortgage Companies

The creative web design phase is quite often the most fun and involved part of any project. This step provides the opportunity for our Toronto web design company to flex its creative muscle and validates all the hard work we’ve put forth during our Discovery and Strategy phases.

Creating B2C website design for financial institutions is unique to many other industries in that user interface design and colour choice play defining roles in the user’s natural decision making ability and ultimately drive the conversion process. Financial websites often rely on medium to dark blue colour palettes to instill a sense of calm and trust within the audience. In the case of XMC’s corporate rebranding, they opted to push forward with a brighter, more exciting blue paired with a vibrant green. Together, these colours signify both trustworthiness and growth, while erring on the brighter spectrum adds a sense of excitement and forward momentum we’re not used to experiencing in the digital age.

Using the vibrant colour palette in conjunction with a bright, open and clean user interface design, our professional web designers carried the theme throughout the wireframes extending the brand throughout the entire user journey.

Our Toronto WordPress web developers get involved early in the strategy phase of our website projects and act as a sounding board for ideas throughout the strategy and design phases. This teamwork helps our creative team to help break boundaries and ensure we’re offering practical and achievable solutions throughout our formative stages. As we near the completion of the creative design phase, our developers are ramping to begin both front-end and back-end WordPress development. This practice allows our team to stagger project phases and maintain forward momentum towards our deadline.

What Our Client Had to Say

Honest and true.

“Working Parachute was an incredibly positive experience – they’re always quick with suggestions for improvement and deliver strong work, often ahead of schedule. We’ve been thrilled with the relationship and hope to continue growth and success. They are experts in their field, and I highly recommend working with them.”

Kim Mercer: Director of Marketing, XMC Mortgage Corporation

WordPress Website Development

Our Toronto web design agency has focused on Custom WordPress development for more than a decade. After all this time, our web developers have become WordPress experts in every sense of the word. With every website we create, we focus not just on the front-end display and day-to-day content management, but also ensuring the back-end CMS is designed and developed in the most efficient and easy-to-use manner for our clients.

Through the use of advanced custom fields and other various customizations to the open-source software, we offer our clients a future-forward platform from which they can extend the average lifespan of their website with minimal intervention for years to come.

Multi-language Website Support

Using the powerful multi-site feature in WordPress, we developed a platform to maintain separate Canadian English and French versions of the website through a single WordPress installation. This configuration allows XMC to easily manage both websites through a single CMS and reduces the time and expense required to maintain both websites.

GEO-location based Broker Locator

One of the most important new features built into the core of the new XMC website is a broker locator tool that allows customers to find XMC-approved brokers within their preset search radius. Users may view the results in real-time online or choose to have a list of top search results emailed directly to them with the broker’s contact information. Additionally, brokers may log in and share resources with XMC customers directly through the website’s Resource Library.

Financial Calculators

For years, XMC relied on a series of prebuilt calculators offered by a third party. This solution worked well enough initially; however, over time, many other competing mortgage lenders incorporated the same tools within their websites. As the calculators we unbranded and required to open in new windows, the experience offered to potential customers was quite poor.

To brand the financial calculators and make them ownable, we worked closely with XMC to first develop the calculator logic and then custom design the calculator interfaces and results pages to create a truly branded experience. Next, we developed tools within the custom WordPress back-end to allow the website administrator to manipulate reference data for the calculations daily. Within the custom-built financial calculators, users now can add additional information to compare forecasts and variable options, as well as email the graphically displayed results to themselves to save for later – all while remaining on the XMC website and interacting with the XMC brand.

Website Deployment

We prefer to stage the new website for 48 hours in its new production environment to ensure we have ample time to iron out any server-related wrinkles before releasing the new website to the public. All web servers are unique to some degree, which can cause websites to behave differently in each environment. During this 48 hour staging, our quality assurance person runs through a pre-launch checklist to ensure that we’ve crossed every T and dotted every I.

Our web design company in Toronto partners with a managed WordPress hosting platform to ensure the website enjoys the latest and greatest performance enhancements, security services and website management tools available. As such, the website deployment process went off without a hitch on launch day.

WordPress CMS Training and SEO Best Practices

With the new website successfully deployed and generating new leads for XMC, it was time to wrap everything up and hand over the proverbial keys. We prefer to demo the new CMS shortly after launch to ensure that there are no further adjustments to the CMS and that everything is working as expected. Through the use of a screencasting platform, we invite all stakeholders to join the training session where our team demos the new CMS covering all the latest tools, interfaces and day-to-day management of the website. Additionally, given our extensive experience in search engine optimization best practices, we pass on some of this knowledge to our clients as well to ensure they put their best foot forward as they create new content.

The WordPress demo is recorded and later made available for download so that our clients may keep a copy for safekeeping long term.

About Parachute Design

Parachute Design has provided custom website design for financial institutions in Toronto since 2003. Our highly skilled and experienced web designers and developers are passionate about functional design solutions. They are always exploring new ways to give every competitive advantage to our clients within their respective industries.

To learn more about our web design and development practice or request an estimate for your website or branding project, please contact our Toronto web design company or call 416-901-8633.

Let’s make something.

Delivering successful website design and functionality for financial institutions takes confidence and experience earned with time. Let our Toronto web design agency help your business grow.

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Let’s make something.

Delivering successful website design and functionality for financial institutions takes confidence and experience earned with time. Let our Toronto web design agency help your business grow.

Start a project