By
The only things in life that are certain are death, taxes and the fact that even the most successful companies sometimes need to take a step back and re-evaluate their web presence.
Maritz did just that earlier this year. If you're familiar with the St. Louis business scene, you've definitely heard of Maritz. Since 1894, they've pretty much dominated the employee recognition, incentive and reward industry and now own nearly a dozen companies offering a wide range of products and solutions. They've also been consistently voted a top place to work in St. Louis.
In short, they're all about what motivates people – people being the key term. As a people-centered company, it's critical that all of Maritz's products and services (online and offline) are usable and accessible.
That brings us to their corporate website, which the Maritz team agreed just wasn't telling that people-centric brand story well enough. Tactically, it also wasn't serving the company's goals of driving customers to the correct Maritz subsidiary and recruiting prospective employees.
Maritz needed to act, and act quickly. So they contacted the best web consulting firm in the galaxy. We dug their awesomeness. They dug ours. Boom. Roasted. Project.
We wasted no time diving into discovery, what with a very condensed (like, one month) project timeline and all. In order to help Maritz tell its story of uncovering what makes people tick, we had to figure out what makes Maritz tick. Our project team became intimately familiar with all of Maritz's companies, their products and their solutions.
Collaborating closely with the Maritz marketing team, we architected a brand new, fully responsive web experience that simplifies the Maritz subsidiaries into logical solutions and presents them in a manner consumers can easily understand.
The new website lets users who may not be familiar with the Maritz companies browse them by solution, sort them by specific product or service and link directly to each company's website. Bottom line: no more second-guessing whether customers have found the Maritz solution that's right for them.
Once we knew we had a winning site architecture in our hands (or rather, on our screens), we got to work creating the visual design. Rich images, a vibrant color palette and intuitive iconography work together on the new website to help users easily find the information they need. All while highlighting the very soul of Maritz: talented people who produce excellence for the company every day.
We delivered the new site wireframes, visual design and CSS style guide to Maritz's in-house development team, who totally crushed it and launched the new site in late September.
“The evolution of web technology, user behavior and devices creates significant opportunities and challenges,” said Integrity CEO John Simanowitz. “We are honored to support such an important institution as they grow and innovate in this dramatically shifting space.”
Are you longing for a better user experience for your web product? Good thing that's our obsession, huh? Let's talk.
