Last week Johnson Bank launched a new website
designed and built by Finn Digital. Rich in features, the new site
aligns itself with an overall re-branding effort by Johnson
Bank.
The Challenge
The main challenge in the Johnson Bank redesign was taking an
older rather outdated site and updating to better fit the target
audience.
The Solution
Finn Digital worked with Johnson Bank to delve into the minds of
their core customer. With that in mind we were able to align design
and functionality within a brand persona. Along with a visual
overhaul, features and functionality needed to be re-evaluated.
Areas of interactivity were added to increase not only the visual
impact of the site, but the functional impact as well. Lead
generation tools were added as a dynamic module that can be added
to various pages. Tools were created to pull forward the great
content that Johnson Bank already has. Overall the site was built
as a modular whole, allowing for flexibility as the site grows.
This means we can keep a close eye on analytics and customer
feedback, and tweak the site based on the data. An agile site is
important, allowing your site to align closer with your customer as
time passes.
A Little More About
Design
The design of JohnsonBank.com revolved around the consumer of
the Johnson Bank brand. The consumer was carefully analyzed and a
persona was created: "The Traditionalist". The Traditionalist has a
brand attitude of Timeless, sophisticated, approachable and
straightforward. This persona was then summed up into what each of
those items meant for the consumer and how each of those items
should make the consumer feel. From there we could attach visual
and experience based guidelines to language and design. Everything
we designed was based around these premises and weighed/tested
against not only the persona, but real consumers as well.
The Johnson Bank website design was fun to work on, as it came
at the same time as an overall brand re-alignment with Johnson
Bank. Finn Digital worked with the team at Johnson Bank to make
sure the new website would align itself to the other new branding
efforts being done by Johnson Bank. The design was also tailored to
share some of the assets previously bought for other campaign
efforts, making the site greatly more cost effective. Overall the
site is lasting, consistent, multi-generational, polished,
put-together, intelligent, confident, sincere, down-to-earth,
humble, friendly, honest, direct and uncomplicated. The
Traditionalist is not looking for a cold, serviceless bank to hold
their money. They are looking for a family, someone to help them
navigate their financial matters with. This look and feel was
accomplished through a warm, textured, "real" interface mixed with
carefully selected brand imagery that reflected the core values of
the new Johnson Bank brand.
Navigation
Navigation was split into three main sections and some
supporting sections that encompassed Johnson Bank as a whole. The
Johnson Bank customer falls into one of three main categories;
Personal, Business or Wealth. Each of these three areas have
similarities, but ultimately it was discovered that the average
user spent most of their time within one section. Each section was
treated separately, but together. Imagery, color, and content were
all tailored to the minor difference in customer value. The rest of
the items, such as resources and contact information were housed
outside of the three main areas, and shared by all three.
Features & Functionality
One of our favorite features of the new Johnson Bank site is the
rich interactive banner areas on the homepage and main segment
landing pages of the site. These areas help tell the story of the
Johnson Bank consumer, and allow them to discover parts of the
business based on their current stage in their life. These
life-cycle areas not only provide a nice interactive guidance for
the consumer, but they enhance the brand of Johnson Bank.
We developed a Lead Generations contact form that can be placed
in desired locations throughout the site, and Johnson Bank can fill
out the properties of that form, on a per-page basis to route the
end-users requests to the correct Johnson Bank Advisor to maximize
turn-around and sales leads.
A new Whitepaper Library was created for end-users to request
and to collect. These downloads also provide possible sales leads
to the Johnson Bank staff. The CMS is built to enable Johnson Bank
to quickly input new whitepapers as new ones are written.
Newsletter sign-ups were created in various forms to allow for
users to easily sign up for one or all of their newsletters.
We developed a section on the website for their new Financial
Calculators Library, which engages and educates its customers. This
gives value to end-users to research and collect information and to
help them make financial decisions. A specific lead-generation form
was also developed for the Financial Calculators library, which
again gives Johnson Bank the opportunity to control the routing for
those requests for each individual calculator, to maximize
sale-leads. The CMS is built to enable Johnson Bank to quickly
input new calculators as new ones are added.
For auditing and internal content workflow, a Staging and a
Production CMS environment was developed for the website, where
content can be approved on a staging site, and easily pushed live
to their load-balanced production environment once approved.
The Blogs
Along with the new website, we also developed new Wordpress
blogs for Johnson Bank. These blogs were designed to fit the brand
and offer a clear channel of communication on an ongoing basis
between Johnson Bank and their customers. Three blogs were set up,
one for each of the three segments of Johnson Bank. The three blogs
all have a different audience, so they all carry a slightly
different tone in both visual design and content. Opening up the
channel of communication offers yet another lead generation tool
for Johnson Bank to take advantage of.
Visit the site
Visit the like family...
blog
Visit the generations...
blog
Visit the across the table
blog
- Jake Rhode
Art Director