You’ve probably seen the commercials on television. You know, that insurance company with the Army General who is always conspicuously accompanied by his little penguin friend. If by some chance you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a moment to watch some of the entertaining commercials on YouTube.
When The General approached us for help with a redesign, it had been five years since their website’s design was last updated. Five years is a long time on the web and the old site could benefit from a more modern look and feel. Needless to say, we were thrilled at the opportunity and were confident we could work with The General to build something worthy of their growing brand.
Strategy and Direction
In our initial discussions, The General recognized that having an effective web presence would directly correlate to revenue growth. Therefore, it was apparent that users needed to have a positive experience when visiting TheGeneral.com. To drive towards our desired user-experience, the site needed to be easy to use, visually appealing and intuitive to navigate. The number one goal for TheGeneral.com, above all else, was to make the insurance-buying process as simple as possible for the customer. Every aspect of the website needed to align with this goal.
With that in mind, one of the main challenges we faced when approaching the redesign was that the current site was already doing very well in terms of its conversion rate. So, not only did we need to maintain that rate, we were determined to increase it. How did we intend to accomplish this? Keeping the main goal in mind, we needed to simplify the quoting/buying process. The primary intent was to give the quote area more importance on the home page by increasing its size. Our goal was to make the quote area the main focal point of the home page so that there was no question as to what we wanted users to interact with.
In addition, we aimed to make calls-to-action on secondary pages much more clear and obvious in order to drive more people to the quote process. And finally, the overall design of the new site had to be consistent with the current branding and television commercials in order to maintain familiarity with current customers. By utilizing a similar color palette and page layout, and keeping the design very clean and simple, we were able to refresh the site without drastically changing what people were already used to.
Additional Details
Not only did we want to provide The General with a refreshed face for their online presence, we also wanted to give them the ability to manage the site themselves. One thing that was discussed during an initial strategy meeting was that their old site was too challenging to maintain. To solve this problem, we built the new site on top of the ExpressionEngine content management system. ExpressionEngine is excellent at managing small to medium-sized sites, so TheGeneral.com was a perfect candidate for the client-friendly CMS. And by utilizing some of the best ExpressionEngine module add-ons available, this will most certainly allow for simple and efficient updates to be made to the site.
In addition to the CMS, we also assisted in a few additional aspects to ensure that the site met the client’s expectations. For starters, making the website more SEO-friendly was a top priority. By properly constructing the website with current web technologies, and by writing smarter and more concise content, we were able to improve ranking organically. The site also contains numerous pages full of state-specific insurance information with the intent to educate users, which also helps improve SEO rankings.
In Conclusion
Website redesigns are always a challenge and TheGeneral.com was no exception. While simplifying the design and improving usability of the site, we had to keep the main goal in mind: make buying insurance easy. The old site did this well, but we wanted to make it even better. In the end, everyone really pulled together to make the process and launch as good as it could be. Now we’re excited to follow the reports and analytics which will track customers interactions on the site and tweak when needed to generate bigger sales numbers. Because at the end of the day, conversions are the name of the game.
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