Lightbay needed to portray their professionalism online, so we crafted a new website to showcase their accomplishments.
Our discovery with Lightbay kicked off with an in-person meeting where we traveled to conduct stakeholder interviews with the Lightbay team in their beautiful Los Angeles office.
Our face-to-face meeting sparked invaluable discussion and provided us with guiding site goals and design direction. During this kickoff, we defined which pages were most important for their target audience and what the main KPIs were for the redesign.
We followed up our in-person discussion with a questionnaire that helped give more specific direction to the new site designs we planned to create.
From there, users could click on a specific portfolio item to learn more about the company and their relationship with Lightbay.
Two other key areas of the site are the Strategy and Expertise sections. These sections are clutch to help Lightbay’s target audience learn more about how they approach investing and the industries they work with. We intentionally structured these sections so it would be easy to see the breadth of their approach and expertise at a glance, and then visitors could dive into the area of interest to find out more.
For the color palette, they wanted to continue using the shade of blue from their existing logo while introducing new complementary shades of blue-grey and white. We agreed with this approach, since blue is psychologically one of the most trustworthy colors. To provide visual variety, we created a set of icons to represent Lightbay’s offerings and values. Our webfont pairing emanated authority and maintained a consistent style with Lightbay’s logo and old branding materials.
In our discovery phase, we learned that Lightbay planned to hire a photographer to shoot photos for the site, which allowed us to lean heavily into using large, bold banner images throughout the site.
We carefully considered which content management system (CMS) to use and determined that building our custom designs on top of the WordPress platform checked all the boxes Lightbay was looking for with a CMS. It would allow the Lightbay administrators to easily update sections on the site, including the team members, portfolio entries, and news stories
Our testing phase consisted of an extensive internal QA where we reviewed the website on multiple browsers and devices and tested adding content to the site to ensure items were uploading and displaying properly.
After we quality checked the website, we arranged a meeting with Lightbay to walk them through the new website. During this meeting, we passed over the controls to Lightbay to walk them through where they could edit team members, add new portfolio entries, and manage content in various other areas of the website.
We collaborated with the Lightbay team to upload up-to-date content and prepare the site for going live. As part of the content entry phase, we uploaded the images from Lightbay’s photoshoot, which gave the site a uniquely personal touch. At launch, the website was integrated with Google Analytics to allow web administrators to monitor site performance.