Website redesign boasts improved UX, accessibility and responsiveness for Excel Communications

Industry

Education

Challenge

Excel Communications' website suffered with multiple issues including a outdated UX, accessibility, responsiveness across devices, and a website template that was misaligned with its brand & needs. The company needed a website with a persona-aligned user journey that reflected the company's brand identity.

Results

Excel Communications new website was launched with a new navigation structure and fresh page layouts that made its website more intuitive. The new website also featured a refreshed visual design and colour palette, better aligned with the company’s offering and industry.

Key Product

Website Design, Website Development, SEO

www.excel-communications.com/

"We felt like we were in really good hands"

Charlotte Benjamin

Strategic Marketing Project Lead, Excel Communications

Image of classmates studying from notebook and laptop

About Excel Communications

Excel Communications is a Learning & Development solutions provider based in the United Kingdom. Excel's mandate is to help people build confidence, grow capability, and drive success through tailored programmes for every level in the organisation from leadership, management to team performance.

The Challenge

Excel Communications, a London-based Learning & Development (L&D) solutions provider faced challenges related to their website’s performance and usability. Their site suffered from an outdated user experience, poor accessibility and mobile responsiveness. The website also lacked the functionality needed to implement the changes their team wanted to see.

The company needed a website that reflected their evolving brand identity, delivered persona-aligned user journey and had a sitemap and navigation that made it easier for visitors to find key information.

SpotDev responded by applying user-centered design principles and leveraging HubSpot’s CMS platform to create a scalable, conversion-oriented website.

Image of a man designing a website

The Solution

SpotDev’s engagement with Excel Communications began with a full website redesign, which included defining a new sitemap. This led to SpotDev's design team creating a micro-brand and developed high-fidelity wireframes.

***A high fidelity wireframe is a realistic outline of what your website page(s) will look like in terms of layout, typography, colours, buttons, forms etc.

These wireframes established Excel's visual direction and were implemented by the development team as a fully custom-coded HubSpot theme. This new theme was designed and built to reflect the company's updated brand.

Custom website template and content migration

As part of Excel's the custom-coded HubSpot theme, the SpotDev's development team built a component library, which included building responsive page templates, modules, and navigation components to provide a modern user experience on all devices and screen sizes. SpotDev also fully supported content migration from Excel's existing website to the new theme - which preserved SEO value and facilitated the immediate use of the new website without delay.

A major benefit to the project was maintaining HubSpot as the Excel's website CMS, meaning that the project could leverage HubSpot's built-in marketing & integrations, while deploying a completely custom theme to match its brand vision.

User journey and navigation support

A key component of the redesign was the website's navigation and menu structure planning, ensuring a more intuitive menu for users and improving the flow of the user journey.

SpotDev also mapped Excel's website visitors' experience and sought to enhance the user journey with a revised content strategy and sitemap architecture. This process helped to guide visitors more effectively through conversion paths.

Visuals and animation

The website redesign included advanced visual and animation work, incorporating a significant amount of movement, imagery, and detailed hover effects - elements that go beyond a standard website build.

New homepage: Excel Communications

Screenshot of Excel Communications' new homepage designed by SpotDev

Previous homepage: Excel Communications

Screenshot of Excel Communications' old website homepage In terms of accessibility, SpotDev conducted cross-browser testing and optimisation, which is the process of ensuring a website looks consistent, functions correctly and performs well, resulting in faster load times. Another core focus was improving contrast (brightness) and navigation for screen readers.

SEO, QA and analytics

While not part of the original statement of work (SOW), SpotDev's SEO & product specialist created schema implementations that greatly enhanced the website build.

***Schema implementation adds structured data to your site so search engines can clearly understand your content and enhance how it appears in search results.

The QA and performance testing included the functional testing of forms and dynamic content, as well as ensuring SEO basics were covered (page titles, metadata, redirects as needed).

Due to the fact that Excel's website is built on the HubSpot CMS, it naturally synced with its CRM and marketing tools. This afforded Excel the user engagement insights their team wanted.

Going a step further, SpotDev conducted training with Excel's team on advanced HubSpot analytics and SEO enabling their team to leverage the full capabilities of their new website.

The Results

Client satisfaction with the new website was a notable win, with Tom Hallett, Managing Director of Excel Communications praising the guidance and advisory role of the SpotDev team on website design & development best practice.

The team also celebrated the fact that their website remained on the HubSpot CMS. This meant that they could easily update the content and skipped the learning curve of having to learn to use a new content management system - a key consideration for this project.