Adding a human touch to a website
Community Tax is a Chicago based tax relief company that aims to help individuals burdened with tax debt. The company prides itself in it's customer-first approach, doing whatever they can to provide real help to their clients. Their site felt outdated and their brand wasn't clearly reflected by the website so they employed me for a complete site redesign.
Process
Did you know that first impressions of a website are 94 percent design related? One glance at the old site and you immediately felt it was dated. It was full of jarring stock photography and heavy blocks of text that didn't provide great user experience, let alone encourage users to stay on the site. The primary goal in the redesign was to make the content more digestible and make the site appeal to users on a more personal level.
After conducting competitor research, I noticed a lot of companies used high quality photography in a way that felt personal and drew the viewer in. These were top brands such as H&R Block and TurboTax, which were established and trustworthy. This realization became a crucial component in the redesign, where the first thing a user experiences is a sense of relief on the face of a woman upon first landing on the site. Previously, the homepage was simply text on a colored background which had no emotional impact on the user.
Redesign Features
Blog Redesign
A large portion of the redesign was spent on creative an extensive new blog homepage and category pages to house and organize their content. I created 12 unique blog category parent "hub" pages to display their content. To maintain a coherent flow to these pages, I first designed primary parent and child page templates, adding variations to each hub page depending on the topic. Building out this system taught me the importance of consistency and maintaining a systematic approach to design.
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