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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Finalsite.com Redesign Process
Connor Gleason

Drumroll, please…Finalsite has launched a new website! After months of hard work and preparation, we’re thrilled to show the world the new home of Finalsite.com. With hundreds of pages of new content and the latest resources to help you improve your school or district’s website, we’re here to give you a behind-the-scenes tour and the inside scoop about our launch and the redesign process

Our Discovery Phase

As with all websites, it’s important to pause and evaluate the look, feel, and performance of your website about every two and a half years. It’s a time to consider incorporating new trends in design, improving your site’s functionality, and assessing your site’s mobile responsiveness, accessibility, and how well your visitors are engaging with your site. 

Nearly a year ago, after some soul searching and a thorough review, it was clear our site was in need of a tune-up. It felt a bit sluggish, the design felt dated, and deep down, we knew we could improve its performance. Taking our own advice, we started meeting as a team to begin the “discovery” phase of the redesign.

Luckily, we work with the best in the business, so we knew exactly where to start. 

We met with members of Client Success and People Operations; we spoke with the end market teams and members of Leadership; we Zoomed with employees across the world who develop the products, and we talked about what was working with the current site—and what we needed to improve.

With the new Finalsite.com, we had some very important goals:

  1. Use Finalsite’s modules to power our content, including our CMS, Posts, Calendars, Resources, Directories, PagePops, and Portals.
  2. Improve the overall user experience (UX) by strategically remapping our pages, which meant completely restructuring our navigation and sitemap.
  3. Improve our client user experience by providing quicker paths to the content and resources they access most frequently.
  4. Be more people-focused, and human.
  5. Make data-driven decisions to help guide our content and navigation.
  6. Streamline the look and feel of all website pages to support our recent re-brand.
  7. Make all our pages much more Google-friendly using the latest SEO best practices.
  8. And of course, launch a visually appealing website that “wows” our visitors in its content, design, and overall UX.

That gave us a clear understanding of what we wanted from the new site, but more importantly, we began to collect data to give us more insight into how to better organize and structure the new site’s content and pages.

Data-Driven Decisions to Support Design Choices

To make better choices, we dove into our site’s analytics for an in-depth look of how our users enter, explore, engage, and eventually exit our site. We certainly had a lot of data to review—last year, new users accounted for over a million page views to the site alone!

We studied where our leads were coming from, consulted heat maps to trace the path of our visitors’ behavior, A/B tested our site’s call-to-action buttons (CTAs) to see how language variances can affect decision-making—all in an effort to better understand our users. That information would be critical to avoid confusion, create more purposeful navigation, and make intentional design choices.

For example, we noticed that we were repeatedly seeing more click traffic in the footer of the homepage than we were seeing in our main navigation, which was an indication that our main website navigation may have been too confusing, and our website visitors preferred the simplicity of the footer.

Finalsite footer

A heat map shows clicks within the footer of Finalsite.com from January 2021.​​​​​

After collecting our data, meeting with team members, and finding a whole lot of inspiration, we hit the ground running and went to work designing, gathering content, and creating some magic. With all the hard work behind us (and more ahead), let’s take a quick tour of some of the site’s biggest enhancements:

Fresh Content

While we were able to repurpose some content from the old pages, the majority of the new site has been reimagined, including:

  • More than 200 pages of new content, supported by CTA buttons and graphics that keep the website visitor’s journey and accessibility in mind. That included adding forms to nearly every page to remove friction and streamline conversions, which are up 13% since the launch.
     
  • Hundreds of new images to support the re-brand. Adding image titles and ALT text was easier than ever with the Resources and Posts modules. (Using Finalsite’s Resources, when you upload an image, you just have to add ALT text once, and it automatically applies to anywhere you add that image on your site. In Posts, your thumbnails automatically get ALT text added, no effort from you).
     
  • We’ve built a Learning Center to house our latest resources, events, the Finalsite Blog, and our on-demand courses. It’s a great place to find inspiration, learn new strategies, continue your professional development.
     
  • A free admissions and enrollment review. The enrollment journey has never been more important, so we’re now offering a free, expert review of your online admissions & enrollment experience. Request your free review to learn improvements you can make right now to positively impact enrollment.

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A New Home for the New Brand

Brought to life by Senior Designer Ashley Stevens, our homepage has dozens of enhancements to accent the clean, modern look of our new brand that was revealed last year.

“We’ve taken a bolder and more modern approach to the design,” said Ashley. “With stronger use of white space, a wider variety of dynamic layout treatments, and an expressive pastel color palette, it helps bring a sense of vibrancy and innovation to every aspect of the visitor’s journey.”

While Finalsite's new visual identity embraces the different qualities of our brand experience, the updated imagery and visuals better represent how our schools and their families engage with our products and what problems we can help solve.

“The new website is a huge step forward for the Finalsite brand,” said Finalsite’s Director of Brand Brandon Detherage. “With a softer and more restrained main color palette, our client sites and our software are displayed using imagery that allows the products to take center stage. The photos were carefully chosen to mirror Finalsite’s innovation, vibrancy, and expertise while the streamlined design is a true reflection of Finalsite’s intuitive products and trusted services.”

Award winning

Easier Navigation

Our old navigation was cluttered and made it confusing to figure out who we were and what we offered. Many users coming to Finalsite.com are looking to learn more about our company and what we offer, which is why in our main navigation, we’ve simplified our offerings to three key buckets:

  1. School Websites
  2. Software
  3. Marketing Services

We lead with our school website design and highlight our custom website portfolio as well as our favorite themes and what we can offer schools. We go into detail about our deployment process and what you can expect from the redesign, our award-winning school websites, and additional details about security and hosting, as well as our accessibility standards that come with every redesign.

Composer, our content management system, is a huge factor in why schools choose to partner with us, so our software pages, in conjunction with the Mobile App, email marketing, our Admissions and Enrollment software, and add-ons highlight our suite of tools that tie our products together so well.

Our marketing services showcase how we help schools gain a competitive edge with our digital advertising, SEO services, virtual webmasters, and strategy and planning through Finalsite Advantage.

Learning Center

The Learning Center

In addition to website visitors looking to learn more about us, they’re also looking to learn best practices. Over the years, Finalsite’s content library has grown tremendously, and we wanted to provide a simple way for school professionals to find exactly what they’re looking for in a snap.

That’s why we’re especially excited to announce our Learning Center, a grouping of free resources, eBooks, guides, and online courses to take your learning to the next level. You’ll see our revamped blog, which continues to be a fan-favorite, offering the latest in website design, communication best practices, and digital marketing strategies. Take a moment to browse through it and don’t forget to subscribe so you’re the first to know what’s new! The Learning Center is also the best place to find the latest training events and some of the biggest school marketing and communications events throughout the year

Finalsite Courses

A part of our Learning Center, we’re excited to launch Finalsite Courses: an array of online courses in everything from the latest in website design and email newsletters to building a retention strategy and communication best practices during times of change. These bring together Finalsite’s brightest minds, as well as top experts in the fields of school PR and marketing and communications for free professional development. The best part? These lessons are accessible anytime so you can binge them all in order, or skip around at your own pace-we know you’re busy! 

We’re working hard to build up these resources because we know our audiences love on-demand courses, so be sure to keep an eye out for our latest course!

A New Client Portal

If you’re a Finalsite client, our newly designed Client Portal is your one-stop-shop for contacting our award-winning support and client success teams and finding tons of resources and inspiration. It’s where you can access the 24/7 Training LMS, weekly office hours, and helpful webinars — everything that makes being a Finalsite client that much more awesome. It’s also where you can network with peers around the world, explore ideas in the Knowledge Base, and contact the client success team to brainstorm the latest brilliant idea you’ve been thinking about.

Key Takeaway

While our day-to-day efforts are focused on helping our clients succeed with their school websites, it’s been a humbling and rewarding experience to build a better representation of not just our software, products, and our services, but tell the story of the people who work at Finalsite and their passion for education and helping others. 

There’s certainly a lot to take in — and we encourage you to explore the site and send us some feedback! If you’re feeling inspired to begin your own redesign, let’s get started!

Not sure where to start? Finalsite is here to help! Click here to Get Started.


Connor Gleason Headshot

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Connor has spent the last decade within the field of marketing and communications, working with independent schools and colleges throughout New England. As Finalsite’s Web and Marketing Manager, Connor plans and executes marketing strategies and digital content across the web. A former photojournalist, he has a passion for digital media, story-telling, coffee, and creating content that connects.


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