Intro
In order to continue developing their business, mental health solutions provider Rethink required a new angle. The new corporate marketing team sought to improve alignment across their sites and within the company. The company started in 2008 with providing scalable autism treatment training tools and caregiver support. Today, the global health technology leader with a tagline of “Together we power potential” knew it was important to establish a cohesive identity, including messaging and digital presence.
To keep the momentum from a 15-year heritage of health technology solutions and look to the future, Rethink needed to consolidate six websites into four, simplify their structure, create efficiency and better align their websites’ branding. The challenge of the consolidation was in keeping each site’s audience in mind through content, user experience and design.
Impetus for Growth
When new client Rethink came to Solid Digital for help, there were four tasks they wanted to accomplish with this website project:
- Create cohesive brand identity (including messaging and digital presence);
- Improve user experience and journey to drive site-specific conversions;
- Improve rankings and traffic through SEO
In order to create a cohesive brand identity, Solid set out to learn and discover the identity of Rethink and its related divisions. Once Solid determined who each part of the Rethink family wanted to reach, it could begin determining the unifying thread that would tie the websites together.
With four different names and sites, it was a big challenge to make them feel like part of one company. Along with the consolidation of every division under a cohesive Rethink brand, web redesigning of each division’s site was required to align the sites, making them feel more related—like siblings, not identical twins. And, to improve the user experience, it was vital to unify the look and feel of the sites and make things less confusing for site visitors. This included using the same logo mark across sites, creating a palette of four colors for the brand, and choosing one color of the four as the primary brand color for each site. This helped create the visual cohesion users needed to understand that each division was part of the larger Rethink brand.
Next, Solid looked to the audiences that would visit each site and determined the common pathways that typical users take. Solid’s team then defined which directions would be most important for each of the sites. Verbiage and navigation buckets were chosen specifically to speak directly to the audience of each site, and broad, yet familiar terms were chosen that could be used for multiple user pathways; in this way, even if one user jumped from RethinkFirst.com to Whil.com (now RethinkCare.com), they would feel the connection between the two, and they would know where to go next on their user journey.
Originally, a full website consolidation was considered, but instead a smaller first step was taken: the six websites were consolidated into four, with one main brand, Rethink First, and three divisions underneath: Rethink Behavioral Health, Rethink Education, and Rethink Care.
Taking Time to Get it Right
Website and brand consolidations are complex, and Solid Digital jumped right in, knowing that onboarding and extra allotment of time would be vital to allow the vision and strategy to align before moving onto each new stage in the process. Solid’s team took extra time with revisions, extra styleboards, and additional education around their recommendations, building a relationship with each department head to create the best website strategy for everyone.
Rethink is a software company that has an entire team from the top down that are all invested in helping people; they share a strong passion for mental health and education. Solid Digital’s team worked to capture that through focusing on Rethink’s outcomes, what they provide, and through creating seamless back-and-forth user pathways for the audiences between the sites. For example, in RethinkEd, it was important to do more than just provide a solution, but rather: focus on the journey of the educator looking for solutions, which led to creating pathways that made sense among the context of the approachable, yet polished website copy, human-focused photos, and welcoming graphics.
Throughout the process, Rethink’s hands-on team worked hard to accomplish everything required to get the websites done. Both teams balanced efficiency and efficacy, allowing plenty of time to accommodate all four sites—especially when it came to determining the audience-specific UX, solidifying style boards, and tailoring wireframes. Creative exploration was particularly important, and different visual design approaches and possibilities were presented that played with color, illustrations and shapes to be incorporated in all the sites, while paying attention to each site’s particular target audience.
Take a Deep Breath
With any big project, comes a certain amount of challenges. Both teams worked together to accomplish the big goals and work around (or through) the challenges, because the end result is always worth it.
The scope of work shifted, and the project came down to a more transitional phase so that a bigger adjustment and/or website consolidation could be made at a later date. With so many sites and divisions, there are plenty of stakeholders. This project allowed for a more even playing field for each division, giving the same time and resources to each page in order to cultivate a more aligned company across the sites.
Additionally, because each site had a different audience, the user experience and journeys were based on the solution, and catered more to who their audience was. This was an added challenge, but Solid Digital’s team worked with Rethink to hone the best approaches for each. For example, Rethink Ed’s new site is more whimsical and heartfelt–its solutions fall in education, and they’re made for educators of children; Rethink Care, on the other hand, is more subdued, since their solutions are for companies and employees. For the Behavioral Health pages, the audience is different still—their tools help clinics track billing, patient records and therapy, so a warm and clinical, yet serious vibe was important for that site.
Each tailored site spoke to the part of the population it needed to in order to increase conversions (demo requests or otherwise), improve search rankings, and increase organic traffic through SEO.
Beyond keywords, the structure of each site was a big challenge. Site maps had to be built so that each site could use something similar (and stay within that “cohesion” goal). No matter where a user came from, the site map still needed clear indicators of how to navigate to and from resource pages, for example.
Finally, establishing visual consistency was a challenge of time and detail work—the design team made a particular effort to look across all four sites to ensure that not only the consistency, but also the accessibility remained intact through to the end product.
Your Best Self
The new, unified brand guidelines created during the project were provided to Rethink so that every color use, font, and UI element could be used as a reference for continued success while maintaining the visual consistency that was the hallmark goal of the project.
With any website project, it is Solid Digital’s aim to make future growth easy. To that end, Solid’s team helped create sites for Rethink that can be easily updated by a marketing team—the design, the UX, the site management (platforms are all on WordPress and Elementor) were all made for evolution and ease, allowing Rethink to be nimble as they continue to change and become more unified.
The team at Solid Digital was brought on to execute a successful project to both speak to and show the structural organization and excellent management of a family of brands through Rethink’s related websites. Now, with a similar look and feel, the unified sites can bring together both the brand and the people who work toward behavioral health solutions at Rethink.
