Maybe you've noticed something a little different about the look and feel of this website.
This week we unveiled our all-encompassing brand and site overhaul. We redid our logo, completely reworked and focused our site navigation, shortened up our signup process, and added some pretty neat features to our phone reviews. On top of all this, we implemented a clean design with custom, hand-drawn images that reflect our new brand. No stock photos of business people shaking hands here. That's just not us.
Needless to say, we're incredibly excited that we can finally portray who we are as a company. We couldn't have done it without our friends at andCulture. You may not know them by name, but they're the design shop behind the amazing GetSatisfaction website. Check them out at andculture.com.
I'd like to take a moment here and talk about why we did some of the things we did. Whether we made the right decisions or not, only time—and of course, the people visiting our site—will tell, but I think that some of our decisions during the brand and website overhaul might be valuable to a business in a similar situation.
In deciding an overall website and brand appearance, we dove into an ideation process with andCulture. First, we reviewed OnSIP as a service - from the features we offer to our robust and scalable SIP platform to how we build services entirely on open technologies and standards. Next, andCulture interviewed a bunch of our team members and found that our company culture is customer-focused and approachable with a heavy focus on technology and innovation. Our interests and values lie in developing advanced, trustworthy, real-time communications that turns the notion of traditional telephony on its head. Last but not least, andCulture interviewed some long-time and new customers, finding a range of people who were heavily interested in SIP/VoIP technology to people who just wanted a solid, basic phone service. Each customer interviewed found our customer service, pay-as-you-go pricing, and contract-free service to be refreshing. With all that information gathered up, andCulture formed design concepts.
Of all the design concepts, the one that immediately stuck out to us was the hand-drawn illustrations, which were inviting, unique, not too corporate, and techy. However, we were hesitant. Picturing an entire website of cartoonish people was startling; we thought a B2B company selling phone service might be taken less seriously than our competitors. However, combined with bold messaging, clear and accessible information, and elegant front end development, we decided the illustrative approach represents our company's character and sets us apart from competing hosted PBX brands.
Moving onto website architecture decisions... our homepage is the first thing that people see. Our old homepage was pretty standard. The main focus area was a series of 5 tabs, each with a bold claim like ‘SIGNUP NOW AND WIN AT LIFE’ (that's an exaggeration; we weren't that bad), and an image and some text to support that claim. It worked for a while, but we found that it just wasn’t engaging. Very few site visitors were clicking through the tabs and even fewer were taking the time to actually read the text. Some of it was also a bit too technical for someone just browsing. Heck, we used to assault visitors with a wall of text about Session Initiation Protocol right on our homepage. While SIP certainly is important, and we are pretty obsessed with it, it probably wasn’t the best decision to lead with that for our entire audience.
So what did we do? Simplify, simplify, simplify. The focus area of our site now plays out like a slideshow of images. There are four sets of slides. Each set corresponds to a simple, digestible message we want visitors to know about our service, with the images demonstrating that message in a way that’s fun and engaging. We got rid of the text, some of which confused people. Hopefully, with this new image slideshow, website visitors will be able to glean what is OnSIP? and how OnSIP different? in a matter of seconds. It was also important to us that the homepage look clean. We believe that our minimalistic approach of using large bold text paired with relaxing, simple images accomplishes this.
One of the problems with our old site was that we had a lot of one-off pages. Back in the day, one of us would say, “Hey let’s talk about XYZ” and immediately we’d throw up a page at www.onsip.com/XYZ without thinking twice. While we had the best of intentions to provide customers with information they needed, the site structure eventually became too spread out and unwieldy. Our mission for this new iteration was to gather all of the information in those one-off pages and condense them into a sections that flow and make sense. We accomplished a lot of what we wanted with the new ‘What is OnSIP’ section. The ‘Education’ subsection is for the more technical audience and discusses our reliability and scalability, our commitment to standards and open technologies and our technology platform. The ‘Why OnSIP’ subsection is a simple comparison chart, showing how OnSIP measures up against some of the leading hosted VoIP players in the market today. Finally, the ‘Getting Started’ subsection illustrates just how easy it is to get an OnSIP account. This is pages and pages of content simplified and condensed, and we’re still working to do the same elsewhere on onsip.com.
The thing with business VoIP is that there’s a lot of information, but you need to give the site visitors the option to choose how deep they want to go. Some visitors completely tune out after we tell them it’s a business phone service over the Internet. They simply want reliable phone service with some basic features, and that’s completely fine. Others want to dive deep into our technology, integrations (e.g. the Chrome Click to Call plugin), comparing SIP phones, etc. - and it’s just as important to be able to guide them to where they can do that.
Throughout this process, it was vital that we understood our customers' experiences with our website. As such, we collected feedback and interviewed customers for months before designing on a design direction and hammering out a new site architecture. We’ve found that while there are many visitors who already understand hosted VoIP service, there are also many newcomers to Voice over IP technology. It’s an interesting challenge; hopefully, we’ll have some statistics on how we’re doing in the near future.
Next week, we’ll go more in depth about different sections of our site.
Edited by Nicole.