207Solar.com
Problem: Website’s visitors were spending less than 5 seconds on the homepage and leaving the website.
User Problem: Inconsistent branding resulted in visitors not trusting the site which prevented visitors in wanting to explore more into what the website had to offer.
Solution: Redesign website to consistent branding and create more interest so that users spend more time on website and exploring into actual services offered by 207Solar.
Research
When defining the ideal user, I asked the founders of the company a few questions.
Q: Who has employed your company before?
A: We’ve designed and built solar panels for residential properties, commercial & industrial customers.
Q: Out of the three types of clients (industrial, commercial & residential) who is your most frequent customer?
A: We service Commercial clients the most.
Q: Where do you find that most of your customers reside?
A: Most of our work has been on the East coast; Maine, Maryland, some in CO and other states here and there.
Q: Are there more favorable states/regions that are better for solar panels?
A: Anywhere that gets a great amount of sun to power the panels is ideal, open land with little to no obstruction. Although I would say most of our customers have been on the East Coast, we can do the ground work to see if your space is ideal.
From the answers given, I was able to envision who my ideal user that I would be basing the design for.
After coming up with a persona, I peruse the internet and look for inspiration from websites within the same industry taking in their layout, features & navigation.
Ideation
For this particular client, I did need to brainstorm a brand new branding suite. That included:
logos
brand colors &
typography
When proposing a new branding suite, I make sure to send options. With that being said, below is what I sent over.
I chose these colors to help represent the industry of renewable energy.
Uplifting, bright & “going green”
In the end, one of the founders didn’t quite like the idea of green, and he asked me for a different feel. So I came up with the below, which did end up being their brand colors and logos.
After I got the final approval for the branding, I then came up with a site map for 207Solar so that I could really start designing the website.
Design
The first part of my designing process is drawing out digital wireframes. During this process I really get to map out how I think I would like the website to look.
Since the client did request that the website is built on Wix, instead of a low-fi prototype I start building the wireframes right into Wix. So after the digital wireframes were finished up, I start building out the first draft of 207Solar’s website.
The client’s liked the overall look but there were parts of the website that they wanted to omit. I got to working on taking those parts out before I started my final draft.
