CASE STUDY: Commander's Mansion
PROJECT OVERVIEW
SUMMARY
I designed a full re-brand including a mobile-friendly site. This project was for a historic estate run by a municipality on a shoestring budget. This project launched my interest in UX design; I fully executed without any training, learning as I went. No formal research had been made at the time, only that I was one of two sales reps watching both the sales team and users encounter the same pain points repeatedly.
ROLES
Visual Design, User Research, Content Strategy, Information Architecture
TOOLS
Adobe InDesign, Wix, Miro
PROJECT TIME
Three months initial plus ongoing iterations.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
A new, unique website will improve SEO, and organic traffic which will result in more leads which will reduce marketing costs and result in an increase in profits. With clear information and pricing, customers can answer their own questions, so sales staff is not bogged down with unqualified leads.
RESEARCH
As a member of the sales team, I was well versed in the groups of people that were viewing the website and the questions that I was asked repeatedly on sales calls. I established that the core users were planning a wedding, with a smaller group of users that are planning corporate and social events or were production companies that are looking for a film location.
Based on anecdotal data collected, the top 80% of users were looking for pricing information first and foremost. This meant we needed to make pricing a primary focus of the website. The goal of CM team is to provide transparent pricing for all users, to establish trust with the team that will be handling their event. Secondary but equally as important needs were exhibit generous amounts of images of the space in different arrangements, styles and seasons. And lastly, the basics: contact information and policies.
All of these tools help the user self-qualify themselves before initiating contact with the sales team. Without the ability to self-qualify, users often would call for a tour only to feel disappointed the CM was not an ideal fit while also using up the limited time of the sales team.
Additionally, the Mansion was paying upwards of $5,000.00 annually for advertising in online wedding websites because the website was not pulling enough organic traffic from search engines. With SEO increase, the need for secondary advertising will be eliminated, saving a large percentage of the annual marketing budget.
PAIN POINTS &
OPPORTUNITIES
CHALLENGE 1: Website Infrastructure
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Built 10 + years ago
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Poor SEO
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Maintained separately by a host and a webmaster which was costly and inefficient.
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Not ADA compliant
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Not mobile friendly
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Information was difficult to find
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Too few and small pictures
CHALLENGE 2: Branding
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There was no branding for the venue
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Lack of branding left it unprofessional and easy to confuse with other local historic properties.
CHALLENGE 3: Lack of Information
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Lacking pertinant information for users to self- qualify themselves as potential clients.
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If clients can't self-qualify, they would call and/or email with repetitive questions using up valuable sales team time.
SOLUTIONS
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2
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3
1: BRANDING
The Commander's Mansion never truly had a defined brand so we had to build it from scratch. I brought in an illustrator to draw a custom logo. Around that, I built marketing materials & social media strategy. With building a new website, I was able to removed the middlemen and their associated costs. With keywords and SEO links in place, the site has steadily gaining organic traffic at a steady rate. I made the site ADA compliant and mobile friendly with
2: CLEARLY LABELED MENU
After the completion of the first iteration of the site, I noticed while many more users were qualified, we collected quantitative data that showed our copy was not as clear as we had hoped. Many people still had trouble finding the pricing, and asking the same policy questions repeatedly. So in our second iteration of the site, we made the wording more clear: "investment" replaced "details" and "Gallery" replaced "Moments." An FAQ page titled "Things to Consider" was also added allowing clients to peruse the policies at their leisure.
3: MOBILE
The previous website was developed prior to the smart phones hitting the mass market, and therefore was not mobile friendly. Simply making the site alternative in a mobile scale was going to satisfy a huge percent of our audience who were viewing on-the-go. Without this, we would have lost them in the venue search entirely.
4: IMAGERY
The space at the Commander's Mansion sells itself in beauty and history. The previous site had a handful of thumbnail images that were a jumble of professional wedding photos and amateur photos taken by staff. With the new site, I knew that a picture is worth a thousand words and that I needed to add as many pictures of the space being used in different ways would help sell the space before the users have even sent an email. In our gallery of images, we have split images up into five categories based on the four seasons, plus a quick link to the Instagram page for ever changing photos.
DESIGN CHOICES
LOGO & BRANDING
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Top two factors: appealing to a broad clientele and the historic nature of the home.
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Weddings are a large portion of the business, including a large percentage of same-sex marriages.
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I wanted to ensure the site was not overly feminine and that the copy and imagery were inclusive for all couples and corporate clients.
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I wanted to uphold the historic nature of the home. The Mansion was originally built and used as the residence for all the Commanders of the Watertown US Army arsenal for nearly 100 years.
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Despite the military connection I wanted to be aware of skewing too masculine.
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I moved forward with an organic shaped wax seal illustration.
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In addition to the main logo, I designed a logo for their gardening volunteer group, "Friends of the Mansion".
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Branding for this should feel related but different.
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I chose to maintain the same circular enclosure of a monogram but went with an organic laurel wreath to reflect the gardens that will benefit from the groups hard work.
Font choices naturally fell into place. I wanted a script that was indicative of hand written signature like that of a civil war letter. We landed on a simple Edwardian Script. The monogram layered nicely into the wax seal. For the remainder of the branding, I wanted to make sure the lettering was clear and yet still looked classic. So I kept the "Commander's Mansion" in Edwardian Script and all else in Garamond. In some iterations of the branding we have also used just the capitol "C" and "M" in Edwardian Script and the balance of each word in Garamond, making the words even clearer.
The color story for the logo stays clean with a monochromatic black, gray and white. If I chose a marketing campaign in a saturated color tone, I will invert the colors to show in white.
IMAGERY
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I chose to add an image above the fold on nearly every page. These images also double as headers with text embedded.
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Each image was chosen to support the likely user viewing that choice.
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I used images with our former clients facing away from the camera or without people at all so that perspective clients will imagine themselves in place of the pictured couple or how the blank space portrayed could be used in their own unique fashion.
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The Gallery page is organized by season. This allows the sales team to have direct evidence to show perspective clients approximately how their event will look at their desired time of year.
CONCLUSION
After completing the website redesign, I received customer feedback that the site is robust and answers most of their questions. This is key for then letting users self-qualify themselves and eases the job of the sales team. The organic traffic to the site thanks to SEO has more than doubled since the new site went live. Thanks to this, the marketing budget has been slashed and saved over five thousand dollars a year on wedding marketing websites.
The look of the new website gives users more faith in the ability to host beautiful, quality events and therefore is attracting a higher end clientele, thus allowing the team the confidence to increase rental rates 53.8 % to be in line with other luxury venues in the area. Between cutting out the expense and lag time of the additional middlemen, marketing fees, and the rental increase, the venue is on track for 2023 to be its first profitable year since they started hosting events 20 years ago.
