Expanse is a young security start-up based out of San Francisco. When I first joined the team the role of the website was to simply inform investors of our mission and products. My task was to help the site link into a new audience wider than investors. Additionally, the company execs decided that it was the time to change the company name as well. (Previously Qadium).
Expanse explored a number of brand solutions. This required quick turnarounds and a willingness to experiment.
Challenges:
- Company name change (‘Qadium’ -> ‘Expanse’)
- Employ a new visual brand
- Enabling multiple editors to work independently
- A quickly expanding content database
- Marketo landing pages management
- Marketo email management
- No SEO – The website had little to no connectivity to Google
Notable Features
- Minimized the amount of imagery on-page to cut down the number of requests.
- When imagery was used, I either used svgs or Responsive images so the browser could determine which image was appropriate
- Lazy Loading was employed so the entire page worth of images was now downloaded on initial page load.
- All buttons were encoded with Google Analytics click event code to track which offers/links were most popular.
Outcome
- We were successful in meeting the deadline.
- A new more vibrant brand system was installed.
- Stakeholders like the events team could easily login and change/remove events with minor to no help.
- 100% Responsive layout (Bootstrap)
- Download times were in the neighborhood of 3 seconds on a slow 3g cell phone connection.
- Within 6 months we got our website to page 1 (position 10) on the Google SERPs.
- All changes in the collateral sites like Marketo and Greenhouse were coordinated to go live with the main marketing site.
Technologies Leveraged:
- WordPress
- Pantheon
- CSS3
- Grid CSS
- Flexbox
- HTML5
- Bootstrap 4
- PHP
- Marketo
- Google Analytics
- CrazyEgg
- Source Set imagery
- Advanced Custom Fields
