Back Story
OnBoard, a web-based board management software company helps leadership boards work efficiently and get more done in order to have a greater impact on their communities and the world. The parent company of OnBoard, Passageways, was founded in 2003 on Purdue University’s campus. Today, OnBoard serves 6,000+ organizations in over 60 countries worldwide.
OnBoard saw the need to revamp their website to align its brand story and give users a better experience. With OnBoards’ focus on collaboration, creativity, excellence and transparency, they sought out Solid Digital’s team to be their partners in solving this particular challenge. OnBoard most wanted to: improve the look of the site, streamline the conversion strategy, and integrate the changes themselves. Solid Digital partnered up and prepared everything for a clean design hand-off.
The Project
OnBoard’s site needed to be part of a more relevant and simplified digital presence—one that communicated their brand story, clearly showcasing their value to improve the conversion rate of qualified buyers. They sought to future-proof and evolve the brand image through the design. Additionally, they wanted the ability to test various user journeys with internal A/B testing as they grew.
They marked out these specific goals with the new website:
- Obtain more leads per month
- Provide the best service at the middle and bottom of the funnel
- Show value, outcomes and experience
- Modernize the design, making it relevant
- Increase organic visitors to avoid dependence on paid-channels
The Approach
With the project objectives and goals in sight, Solid Digital set to work on the areas of strategic focus for the new website. Using the well-designed and thought-out resources already on hand, Solid Digital created a clearer value proposition for OnBoard. Additionally, the following goals were hit on with different tasks:
Support buyer intent journey
To support buyer journeys, two new pages were created—one focused on outdated tools (“Poor Board Solutions”), and the other (“Outdated Tools”) addressing users who are still using pen and paper—with OnBoard presented as The Solution. This set OnBoard apart for both the experienced and the brand-new-to-board-software customers.
With multiple pathways and a variety of CTAs, Solid Digital helped position OnBoard as a valuable board management software. The multiple avenues for user engagement, including a popular “Free Trial CTA” that was carried over to the new site, helped clarify journeys and offer takeaways for visitors.
Customer-centric messaging
OnBoard’s all-in-one solution was presented to a variety of customers, with the help of industry-specific pages. For example, OnBoard for higher education used messaging specifically about the Governing Boards at Collages and Universities. Each industry-specific page offered up the ideal solution for customers, and every page included the common pitfalls of using any other board solution, while presenting the ideal solution via OnBoard’s features.
Showcasing reputation and credibility
Any company’s investment in new software can be met with questions of reputation and credibility—particularly for non-profits’ limited budgets. Solid Digital helped OnBoard put objections to rest with social proof: highlighting partner logos, adding earned awards, and leveraging positive Capterra reviews. With messaging added around the longevity of OnBoard as a SaaS company, user trust could ramp up even further.
Communicating through graphics
Solid Digital helped simplify the feature-heavy site. With the new site, OnBoard can better convey their values, outcomes, and experience to multiple users, especially in comparison to competitors. Using graphics, like a competitor grid, to communicate exactly what OnBoard offered and how they outpaced the competition helped bring major differentiators to the forefront— visually. OnBoard already had strong marketing, branding, and messaging. Solid Digital helped magnify it.
In addition to these tasks, Solid worked behind the scenes in development, cleaning up the back end, updating or removing old CSS, outdated code, and old plugins.
The look and feel of the site was based on existing elements, with tweaks and additions. For example, color use became more intentional: Using the previous color palette, the color hierarchy was shifted, making the dark purple more prominent, and the magenta less so—with pastel colors introduced for use in the product pages. Additionally, the icons were updated with a cool glass treatment, which was tailored to work better on lighter backgrounds. To add in more visual interest, the new pastels were used to make a repeating motif for the background (called “blobs” or “socks” by both teams) and a composition of various office and board photos helped create engaging images of OnBoard in context.
Additionally, to create better flow, when the site was transferred to the WordPress CMS, global changes allowed all padding to be more condensed, connecting sections and keeping users engaged as they scrolled.
The Challenges
THE HAND-OFF
For this project, the developer involvement was slightly different, including leaving a few things static to allow for a cleaner handoff to OnBoard’s team’s implementation. The tech planning in earlier phases was skipped, and Solid Digital’s senior web developer, Luke, jumped on client calls to discuss any needs prior to the transfer.
To ensure the project was seamless, Solid Digital built out a dozen templates on a staging site, handed them to OnBoard’s team through a live site, and OnBoard created the pages in Elementor and ran with the project.
The Results
In this unique, website design hand-off, Solid Digital involved OnBoard’s team heavily in the project with added check-ins and more working sessions, eliminating any big reveals. The client was engaged throughout: Ashley, OnBoard’s designer, gave helpful feedback during the design portion, and their Senior Digital Experience Manager, Nick, was in the know, advocating for Solid Digital’s recommendations at each step to keep the project seamless. Because Nick had vast Elementor knowledge already, he created a space within the Elementor site to personally manipulate various ideas and layouts without disturbing any Solid-made design templates.
Solid’s recommendations on two distinct items were essential for the project’s success: 1) Two pages for two types of audiences on a customer journey, and 2) Clear development set-up to migrate the pages from staged to live, so OnBoard could be handed the reins without any tangles.
In testing, OnBoard found the new site outperformed the old. Data showed a 15% increase in the number of pages users visited, a 20% increase in time spent on-site and a 10% decrease in bounce rate.
Knowing that OnBoard functions to inspire and enable boards and councils to realize their vision for the future, Solid Digital took part in furthering that mission: Helping them leverage the power of a vital digital tool of their own: their website.
