Jacque Ebarb needed to get the message out about her accounting services. She wanted to help make accounting for small businesses accessible and friendly, but she didn’t have a good way of 1) communicating that and 2) allowing people to contact her easily, quickly, and with little commitment.

What Jacque obviously needed was a website with carefully crafted language that told people quickly what made her business model different. The content needed to flow in a way that was impactful and told people what they needed to hear when they needed to hear it. The site needed to be easy to navigate and contain just enough content to capture the user.

Woven into this goal, we needed to create straightforward, but compelling calls to action placed strategically on the site when people were most motivated to convert. There would be one action on this site, one additional page, and that would be to contact.

Keeping with my process, I began to sketch how I envisioned the website to flow. During this stage many of the ideas I originally thought would be ideal for this client ended up raising a whole new set of issues. For instance, was a form fill the best lead capture? Was it too generic and impersonal? Or when I have a layout that feature no navigation and an emphasis on the call to action, how would I make it easy and obvious for the user to know how to navigate back home? Finally, I was uncertain about the order of the rows on the homepage.

I got some feedback on these issues and started making a wireframe that addressed them in ways that I thought would maintain the best user experience.

By the time we had made it to the design and live prototype phase, most of the aforementioned problems had been solved. We’d decided on a row order for the home page that we thought made the most sense and came to a conclusion on how to solve the navigation issue.

Rather than having a distinct contact page and because the purpose of this website was so simple, we settled on the call to action triggering a popup. This would prevent the user from navigating elsewhere and not being able to return to the home page.

Finally, we chose to test a direct “Schedule Time” call to action rather than a traditional form fill. This felt more approachable and would result in more face-time with Jacque.

Jacque immediately began receiving comments on the modern design and simplicity of her website. It made her more competitive with larger accounting firms because of the establish nature of the site.

Because most leads landing on the site were warm (people who had already met Jacque in real life) the “Schedule Time” call to action was converting well. By the time they were at the website stage, they were ready to talk with her.

*Disclaimer: changes have been made to this website since the initial design.