Case Study:

CrowdStreet

Site Redesign & Build

Background

Grab of CS original home page
Here's a grab of CrowdStreet's Home page, circa from late 2016.

Part One

The original intent of this project was to refresh the existing marketing home page. However, the old site had been cobbled together by various engineers & contractors, resulting in a fragile code base. There was serious technical debt which slowed down the site. It was visually inconsistent with 4 sans serif fonts, no standard font-size, line-height or baseline grid. Most importantly, as a custom Django build, all content edits required Engineering to deploy. This seriously hindered Marketing from getting updates online in a timely manner. It was time for Marketing to have its own shiny, new CMS.

And so, after researching CMS options, we settled on WordPress. I was then tasked with the site design, build, deployment & maintenance. Phew!

Part Two

As design & development continued, the exec team concluded that as a company, we had 2 different audiences:

  1. Sponsors–those businesses who licensed/used our SaaS application (B2B), accordion
  2. Investors–those individuals who used the SaaS app to invest in offerings (B2C).

Thus was born the WordPress Multisite:

  • CrowdStreet Home
  • CrowdStreet Business Solutions for Sponsors, and
  • CrowdStreet Marketplace for Investors.

Artifacts

CrowdStreet Home

resource center wireframes
Articles content from former site was exported to WordPress, retaining URL structure and SEO value. The new site allows for much better filtering options and also works on mobile (original site did not).
home mockups
Months later this page was redesigned to reflect its change in purpose. It functions as a portal for Users to select the Investor (B2C) or Sponsor (B2B) path.

CrowdStreet Business Solutions

business mockups
The initial build of this page is shown by leftmost mockup with other layout options to right. After working with exec team to simplify the message, we arrived at a hero video background with more streamlined value statement.
mockups for accordion/tabs
The initial implementation (left) was preferred by executive team because it emulated a pattern they liked. However, we had far too much content to display in that fashion. After a couple weeks of usability issues (felt by execs) I was allowed to refactor the content into the accordion/tabs pattern now in use. This was truly a case of needing to build it the wrong way first to justify building it in a more user-friendly way later.

CrowdStreet Marketplace

wireframes
Round one. Before much consensus on purpose or message.
wireframes
Round two. Whiteboards and low-fidelity wireframes.
wireframes
Round three. Clarity of purpose, and separation of this landing page for new Investors vs. Investor Center for current Investor Members.
mockups
The Investor Center. Whiteboard, medium-fidelity wireframes and miscellaneous graphics.

2018 Update

In 2018, CrowdStreet underwent a complete rebranding, including implementing a completely new website.
So again...'Digital Ephemera Chef' FTW!