User experience at the heart of the new Business at OECD website

A creative website to promote sustainable business growth

Business at OECD needs to increase its visibility on the web. With this in mind, the international organization chose to completely overhaul its platform using Hubspot CMS. This study provides a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a website that borrows the codes of creative marketing.

Facilitating the web conversion path with the creation of an innovative site

Introducing the company

Founded in 1962, Business at OECD is an international policy organization contributing to the growth and development of companies in all sectors. Connecting multinationals and SMEs with OECD member governments, it promotes competitive economies and sustainable business practices.

About Business at OECD :

• 60 years' experience in connecting business, OECD and governments
• A network of nearly 3,000 business representatives worldwide. Entrepreneurs, managers of SMEs and multinationals.
• 7 million companies are represented worldwide.

3 challenges to meet in redesigning the website

Through its website, Business at OECD reaches out to people from all over the world and from a variety of backgrounds: corporate decision-makers, professional organizations, governments and the media. A reality that drives them to develop a creative and innovative website, dedicated to all their personas. Against this backdrop, the international organization chose to completely overhaul its platform using Hubspot CMS, thanks to Make the Grade.

The 3 major challenges of this site redesign :

1. Modernize the website through a unique and creative graphic charter.
2. Design flexible, personalized modules to enable marketing teams to easily manage and update content.
3. Develop a platform aimed at 4 different types of persona, working in a variety of industries and structures.

Solutions provided by Business at OECD

For any site redesign project, it's essential to define key stages, covering both design and development.

• Definition of the Business at OECD artistic direction: design of a complete benchmark and moodboard.
• Creation of page models: conception and design of ergonomic and graphic models, animations, then technical development of the pages.
• Publication of their new website: branding plan, acceptance testing and redirection plan.

1. Definition of artistic direction Business at OECD

Before even beginning to design the site, it was essential to carry out an inspirational benchmark. This benchmark will be carried out in 3 phases. The aim is to identify all the areas for improvement and the most effective techniques for boosting the site's activity.

First part: a competitive benchmark
The idea is to situate the site in relation to its competitors, identify their comparative advantages and pinpoint areas for improvement. The aim is not to copy the methods used, but above all to analyze Business at OECD's own challenges. Where are your weaknesses? For example, are you having trouble finding visuals that will make an impact on your audience? You can use a benchmark to analyze the competition and understand their practices.
It's also an opportunity to keep up to date with new market trends, so you can apply them to your website.

Part two: a functional benchmark
For this second stage, we identified the most effective web functionalities and practices for visitors. Those that serve their objectives and bring real added value, or on the contrary those that complicate the user journey. This analysis enabled our teams to deploy functions that satisfied user needs and were capable of generating engagement.

Third part: a design benchmark
The final part of the benchmark concerned design and ergonomics. As Business at OECD wanted to create a single platform, the visual identity issues were crucial. Above all, we had to think about an interface that would stand out from the crowd, at every level of the site. This included all elements of the graphic charter, such as titles, call buttons, colors, fonts, etc.

This global benchmark can be useful for all the issues encountered when creating a site:

• Page loading speed
• Effectiveness of call-to-action buttons
• The quality of landing pages
• Customer evidence
• etc.

It's a method not to be overlooked if you want to improve the performance and quality of your website.

We then began to build a moodboard, in order to draw up a design vision and anticipate future graphic layouts.

By analyzing best web practices, we gathered the most innovative elements for this project. The creation of a moodboard enabled the design team to share exactly what they had in mind with the client. Inspiring site templates, fonts, photographs, color palettes, and other graphic parameters according to the organization's needs.

2. Creation of page templates

The design and development teams faced a major challenge in meeting Business at OECD's expectations. The organization wanted to stand out from the crowd, with an animated and creative site featuring numerous animations. However, targeting a broad category of people, the question of accessibility arose. Not all structures have the same knowledge of digital technology. Solutions had to be put in place to ensure that behaviors were as easy to interpret and logical as possible. To achieve this, several 3D animations were created. The aim was to enable the customer to preview the pages and get an idea of the final rendering. These animations included :

• An animation showing all the elements of the main page

• A two-in-one animation showing the menu in a user journey context

A problem also arose with the "Policy Groups" page. This page includes a large number of categories, all of which needed to be visible. The only option was a list system, with a hover concept, to keep things lively and encourage the user to interact. This hover concept was also used for other pages on the website.

To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Business at OECD wanted a special page. A landing page in the form of a timeline, presenting all the organization's key dates, was therefore designed. As you scroll down the page, each date adapts to the content and images, making for more pleasant reading.

Once all the graphics and motions had been validated, all that remained was to integrate the page templates. In contrast to an inbound marketing strategy, here the graphic aspect took precedence. With advanced motions and animations, development and design times were consequently impacted. As a result of the developers' work, the Business at OECD teams now have a site that meets their expectations. A site that is both institutional, promoting the organization's image, easy to use, and above all unique in its creative aspect.

3. Publication of their new website

Last but not least, the release of the site. The teams followed a very precise process to ensure that the launch would be perfect. First phase: the tagging plan. This enables us to collect visitor data and track their actions and visits. To optimize this tagging plan and SEO, it's important to work on all the platform's content: call-to-actions, alternative tags, forms, keywords, etc.

The second phase of this site release is the redirection plan. In a site redesign project, this involves redirecting all old pages to the new equivalent. Having identified all the URLs in the old site's tree structure, we were able to define their new equivalent and create the redirects. By neglecting this task, we would have run several risks for the Business at OECD site:

• Reduced traffic from search engines while the new URLs were being integrated.
• Downgrading in the results pages, linked to the disappearance of the initial backlinks.

Finally, the grand finale before going live: acceptance testing. To ensure that the site meets the customer's expectations, we analyze all deliverables in three categories:

• Design, ensuring that animated models and motions have been respected.
• Technical, with performance tests and corrections of problems encountered.
• Marketing, to check content consistency and SEO optimization.

The results

This site redesign enabled the Business at OECD teams to benefit from a unique, tailor-made platform. More than 50 pages were published, all designed to make the site as lively as possible, and to meet a major creative challenge. If you too are considering a redesign project, take a look at a selection of  websites created with Hubspot CMS.