Inspire Accountants: Our Incredible Website Redesign Case Study with Unbelievable Results
We are really excited to share our website redesign process with Roze from Inspire Accountants. The whole website redesign journey from start to finish is summed up here with our real life redesign case study: Inspire.
Roze is Head of Marketing and Partnerships for Inspire and is in charge of lead generation and ultimately driving the revenue goals for the business. This made her the perfect person to champion the project of redesigning the Inspire website.
Ben, Chartered Accountant & Founder of Inspire Accountants, built their first ever website in 2015 and for someone with no formal experience, we think he did a pretty ok job! But in 2018, Ben thought he would enlist the help of some professionals and that’s when we at Five by Five entered his life!
We designed and built the next version of the Inspire website and it really stood the test of time for about four years.
Then at the end of 2021 we took on the task of a big logo, branding and website redesign to freshen up Inspire accountants.
It’s been five months since Inspire Accountants launched their redesigned website and going through this experience has actually changed their marketing strategy overall.
When Is It Time To Redesign Your Website?
Roze used the words, very energy intensive and tiring to describe how working for Inspire in 2019 was. They all travelled interstate twice a month to run labour intensive, in person events and the work life balance got a bit out of whack for a lot of the team.
Then obviously Covid hit and put a big handbrake on all of that.
Like many businesses who had to quickly adapt, Inspire shifted all of their events online. The website was simply a validation piece and just a spot for people to find out who they are and what they did. Just an information hub, there was no focus on the website in terms of generating leads for Inspire.
The fundamental shift in the middle of last year was Inspire wanted this website to work harder. Roze wanted the website to be a tool that actually gets the phone ringing and gets leads and enquiries coming through.
Prior to engaging with us, Roze would be tracking all the leads that come into the business as appointments booked with their accountants. One of the things Roze noticed is where the leads came from, and a good portion of them was actually through a Google search.
The second thing was actually the marketing reports that Roze received from us each month on how the website was performing and she noticed that Ben’s blogs he wrote in 2016 were still performing to this day and driving traffic to their website.
That was kind of like an a-ha moment that they needed to kind of shift gears and start focusing on the website. They wanted to write more blogs, change the website and make the customer experience a lot better. So when you land on the website, the journey is quite easy to then book a phone call with an accountant and know what their services are.
Planning Your Website Redesign Strategy
Becoming more SEO friendly was the lens that we went into this web design strategy with and planned the redesign with the aim to gather more leads and enquiries. The existing Inspire website wasn’t a bad website and there was a bunch of stuff that was working on there, we just had to identify what it was.
Inspire had a bunch of valuable content sitting there on the HubSpot site that was then brought back into the fold with WordPress.
Stages of Website Redesign
Wireframe
The first thing we did was create a wireframe. A wire frame is a not so sexy version of a website, it’s a low fidelity version of just the things that are going to go on the site. So we get really clear on the blocks that’ll exist on the homepage and the internal pages.
This is a collaborative process between us and Roze as Head of Marketing for Inspire where we figure out what physical elements are needed to support the new goals, the hierarchy and the importance of each element, and ultimately form the redesign plan.
It’s kind of like the first taste test of what the website redesign could potentially look like after the planning process.
Static Website Design
Next we get into the design layer where we actually mock up the redesign and it starts to take shape and actually looks like a website. We then presented this online to Roze which is another opportunity to collaborate, refine and improve.
Roze was very clear about who Inspire works with, during the website redesign. Inspire talk about their ideal client on their homepage as someone who’s doing over half a million dollars to $10 million in revenue and work in specified industries. On their redesigned homepage, their ideal client will completely understand what the engagement process looks like.
The language used in the copy also got overhauled to express the personality and brand of Inspire Accountants. Casual language including words like “suss” really hammers home the idea that Inspire are not your average accountants.
During this phase of the redesign, we used an application called Invision, and basically what it does is it gives Roze the ability to see what her website’s going to look like on screen at 100%. We could then receive feedback that came directly from the Inspire team and were able to collaborate on all those bits and pieces.
Roze found it very easy to communicate with your team about what needed to be changed and tweaked and we could respond back to her feedback as well, and let her know if it’s been actioned or what our thoughts were around her suggestions.
Development
The development phase of a website redesign brings all the design work to life. Some key aspects of the Inspire site’s redesign can be seen on their homepage.
The previous version of the website used more of a traditional navigator. We had all the items up there on the top menu bar.
But really people are only interested in three things when they visit the Inspire website, they want to see our team because people buy from people. And Inspire Accountants don’t look like your average accountants – they are youthful, fun people that ultimately you would want in your life and by your side. Users then wanna see the ‘about us’ section and then the services that are being offered.
We tucked away all the extra information in a modern hamburger menu, prioritising strong calls to action and the imagery in the team, the awards they’ve won, and testimonials, all building trust and validation.
The other cool feature we could develop for the homepage during the redesign is a tax saving calculator. Roze provided us with an Excel spreadsheet that contained the formulas and logic and we were able to build it into a ‘value add’ to live on the homepage and act as a lead magnet to attract more leads and enquiries.
The other interesting function of this tax calculator is it actually filters out non-ideal clients by asking them questions about their business in order for them to access their result and therefore saves the Inspire team time when deciding who is worth a follow up.
Benefits of a Website Redesign
The major benefit of Inspire’s website redesign was setting up their website for search engine optimisation.
Adding a blog page where all of Ben’s blog posts live allowed all of the valuable content from the old website to still work its magic and attract organic users. It also allows for more content to be added weekly in the form of blogs and podcasts, just so we can get more of that SEO juice for the Inspire website.
The weekly in person events that Roze was running for Inspire pre-covid, have since turned into fortnightly webinars and the other benefit of the website redesign is that it is now able to advertise, gain registrants, and host these webinars before turning them into long form blog posts for further SEO.
Even with Christmas and Inspire being closed for three weeks, that first week back in January, they had 12 appointments booked with an accountant which they had never seen before. This website definitely needs a pay rise as it is truly the hardest working team member out there!
Before the website redesign, Inspire had almost zero organic digital footprint but now, two months after the redesign, they have had almost 1000 unique organic visitors from a Google search.
So less physical work from Roze equals more leads and enquiries! Win!
If you think your website could do with a redesign, whether you want to change the focus of your business, work less for each lead, or simply update the visuals of your website, then get in touch with our strategy team today.
