Behind the Scenes of a VIP Design Day
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Ever felt like your website doesn’t reflect your business as you’ve grown and honed your audience, message and niche?
Even when you actually love your website, sometimes it needs a solid refresh, some updating and a little pizazz to show the you that you’ve stepped into. You may know what you want your visitors to get as far as content and ease of use on your website, but have no idea of what you want it to look like or how to get it there.
This is how Kristen was feeling about her website before we worked together over 2 VIP Design Days to refresh her website. And I’ll let you in on a little secret… It’s completely NORMAL to feel this way – even I’ve had moments of feeling like this!
Kristen is a finance coach who helps entrepreneurs maximise their profits, master their cashflow and build confidence with their finances. Pretty amazing, right?
Unlike most finance coaches, Kristen gives support with both business and personal finances so her clients can really maximise their life and what their business is doing. She also has a big focus on goals and values to help with financial decision making, since at the end of the day, it’s about what our businesses can provide and allow us to do.
Now Kristen is excited to share her website everywhere and is proud of the cohesiveness of it all. She knows that when someone lands on her website, it reflects her personality, her business and the transformation she helps them with.
The best part? These are the results she’s had so far:
“Since working with Jessica, I've gotten tons of compliments on my website. My overall net revenue is up more than 120%. I attribute my website design and SEO very much to a reason behind that due to confidence, price increases, SEO traction and overall ease of use and cleanliness that are all an indirect result of the changes in my website.”
Because everything is laid out to focus on her clients needs, we expect that she’ll continue to gain traction, with even more traffic from SEO and an increase in the time people stay on her website – she already has people telling her they can get lost in her content and go down a rabbit hole, and if you check out the amazing resources on her blog, you’ll understand exactly why!
Kristen’s favourite parts of the experience?
“Jessica made the process so easy! I'm a sucker for simplicity and she’s so well organized prior to working together and has such well thought out questionnaires, that it makes it incredibly simple on this side. I loved the planning session and having her help unpacking my thoughts. She may not be an expert in my business, but she’s an expert at what people are looking for, what works and what’s popular - it helps so much!”
Here’s the Deets:
The Process:
Once we locked in our VIP Design Day, Kristen had a design brief to complete. This goes through some questions about her business and goals, her ideal client, her branding, what she likes and dislikes on websites (with website examples to ensure we are on the same page), and which updates she wanted to cover on her website. She also had to gather any images she wanted to use on her website and provide any copy if she was making changes to it.
A few days before our Design Day was scheduled, we jumped on a strategy call to go through everything together. This allowed us to work out which updates would have the biggest impact and were the highest priority to get done. We are able to bounce ideas for the different pages and make sure the updates will actually help Kristen achieve her goals, which is quite important if you want an effective website that works for your business.
Due to the time zone differences with me being in Australia and Kristen being in the USA, we ended up splitting our Design Days in half each time. I would jump in to start making updates in the evening here, and then when I needed feedback or had questions, Kristen was able to answer once she started work, plus had a break to look over things halfway through to see if any changes were needed. I shared a bit more of our objectives and what we covered on each of our Design Days below so you can check them out.
After our Design Day, I sent through an update of what we were able to achieve in our Design Day, along with any design files for Kristen’s website and any training videos I created if we were adding any new functionality so that Kristen can make any changes she needs to in the future. Kristen also had 30 days of email support after, which allows her to ask any questions she might have about the updates.
The Template:
Brine on Squarespace 7.0
Is there any custom code?
Sure is! I love playing with custom code since it’s a great way to add really personalised touches to my clients’ websites. Kristen had also previously worked with a designer to create a sales page that had a lot of code, which needed to be carried over to other pages on the website to create consistency as well.
Favourite Creative Features:
1 | The way the pages are broken up visually with coloured sections, images, split sections and blocks of content to really help balance the pages and create a good flow through the page
2 | The way the blog title overlaps the summary block images to create some added layers and visual interest
3 | The book section on the resources page with the coloured section on one side balancing out the multiple book images
During our first VIP Design Day, we:
Refreshed Kristen’s home page with a focus on growing her email list, clearly highlighting the benefits of working with a finance coach and booking discovery calls in an easy-to-understand way
Refreshed the Business Financial Coaching page with a fresh new look that draws visitors in to explore the page and book a discovery call
Created a landing page to promote her free guide with tips to create a financial roadmap to success along with a thank you page that encourages her visitors to stay and explore her blog
Added the pink colours and textured background into her branding, and changed out some of the photos to include Kristen and reflect her personality more to help her connect more with her ideal clients, which are women
Cleaned up the navigation and added a button to schedule a call along with creating a streamlined footer to make it really easy for her visitors to find their way around the website (silly me did this step before I took the initial screenshots, so the before screenshots show the updated navigation and footer)
Weaved in more testimonials strategically and in a visually compelling way
Check out the Before & Afters below ⇩⇩
Home Page Before
Home Page After
Business Financial Coaching Before
Business Financial Coaching After
During our second VIP Design Day:
Our second VIP design day was spent creating an epic resources page with all of Kristen’s best business and personal finance resources. Seriously, there is so much amazingness on this page and it was a lot of fun to create!
Because there are so many different types of resources, it was really important to make sure everything was laid out in an organised and streamlined way, so that it was easy for her visitors to find, without being overwhelming. We achieved this by:
Grouping the resources into different categories
Adding links at the top of the page to each of the sections so it’s easy for visitors to skip directly to what they are looking for
Strategically organising the categories to prioritise business goals, so the most important items that will have the biggest impact on Kristen’s business are closer to the top
Visually distinguishing each section so it flows well as visitors move down the page and clearly breaks up the content
