Jenine Marquez
UX/UI Designer
For my capstone project, my team was tasked with building out a new brand, strategy, and website for Jim Ball Coaching. As a web/graphic designer on the team, I redesigned his brand and website under the new name Prestige Professional Development Consulting. I also helped code the website in Wordpress from scratch.
Background
For my master’s capstone class, my team was tasked with coming up with a full-scale rebranding package, digital communications plan, and website for Jim Ball Coaching. My team consisted of two web designers/developers and six digital strategists, and our team competed against one other team.
Jim Ball is a certified CliftonStrengths consultant who coaches individuals and teams on how to utilize their strengths for professional success. He currently works under Strengths Now Inc., but he wants to establish his own brand and expand his company. Jim currently targets three different markets: corporations/B2B clients, entrepreneurs, and veterans. However, he primarily wants to focus on attracting more B2B clients right now. Therefore, we decided to build his brand based on his main target audience.
Website Audit
When looking at Jim Ball Coaching’s current website, here are the main issues our team noticed:
The page completely lacks branding for Jim Ball Coaching and only contains Strengths Now branding. Even though he works under Strengths Now, the page has almost zero information about him, except a bio on the About page.
He encourages users to leave his website and visit the Strengths Now website instead - if you click on the logo in the nav, it will redirect you to the Strengths Now page instead of bringing you to the homepage. If you’re going to redirect people to the Strengths Now page and barely include information about yourself, why even have your own website?
The inside pages are overwhelmed with different subsections. The Who We Serve page has six different options for you to click, and the How We Help page links to eight different subpages. Too many choices can overwhelm and confuse the user, especially if they are visiting for the first time and they don’t know what they want yet.
Click on each image to get a closer look.
Homepage
How We Help
Who We Serve
About Us
Goals
Establish a compelling brand that highlight’s Jim’s strengths and attracts larger B2B clients
Inform potential clients about the company’s mission and services
Create a high-converting website that encourages users to connect with Jim
The Brand
Name
When choosing a new name for Jim Ball Coaching, our team brainstormed words that summed up the core of his company. Ultimately, we landed on prestige, which Oxford Languages defines as “widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality.” Prestige Professional Development Consulting sets the tone for Ball’s strength-based approach with a bold statement of respect, admiration, achievement and quality.
Logo
After coming up with our name, we came up with the logo. Each team member sketched out ten logo ideas, and there ended up being many recurring themes and ideas in our sketches. Since Jim is a US Army veteran, there were lots of eagles and flags to represent his background and continuing patriotism. Therefore, when I drafted the final logo, I embedded an eagle and stripes within the monogram. In addition to showing Jim’s patriotic background and values, the forward-facing eagle also represents wisdom and strength.
Branding
Once I finished the logo, I developed a set of brand guidelines to establish trust with potential clients.
For the type, I used the Noto TC font family: Noto Sans TC for the headlines and body copy, and Noto Serif TC for subheadings. By mixing the sans serif and serif versions of the same font, I wanted to strike a balance between bold and elegant, and classic and modern.
The main brand color is navy blue, which is associated with security and dependability. Navy blue is used by brands like Facebook, Dell, American Express, GE and Intel to instill trust. The brand also utilizes gold as an accent color, which evokes wealth and prosperity, and a gray-blue, which neutralizes the color palette and complements the navy blue color nicely.
For imagery, we chose sleek photos of skyscrapers and modern architecture. With these images, we wanted to highlight precision and innovation with clean lines and shapes, as well as recall familiar imagery among corporate workers. To balance out the architecture images, we also included candid workplace photos to evoke authenticity/warmth in a professional setting and give potential clients space to imagine themselves within these images.
Sketches, Wireframes and Mockups
Homepage Sketch
When sketching out the basic layout of the homepage, I used the EPC method, which lays out content in a way that optimizes the chance of a lead converting to a customer.
Educate: The first part of the website focuses on informing the user about Prestige. Since Jim Ball is the face of Prestige, users will automatically see Jim’s face and receive a quick introduction from him, as well as see the certifications he holds. Then, we will further explain the company and some of the services offered.
Proof: After educating the user about who Jim is and what he does, we’ll offer proof that his strengths-based approach is the best. We’ll include a few statistics that show positive results from Jim’s methods.
Community: Once we provide proof that Jim’s coaching works, we’ll introduce Jim’s previous clients and share their glowing reviews. By seeing that others have worked with Jim and had a positive experience, users will believe that Jim’s services will also work for their company.
Wireframes
After sketching out the basic layout of the homepage, I and Siarra (the other web designer on the team) fleshed out the homepage into a wireframe, as well as the About and Contact page.
For the About page, we wanted to start with Prestige’s mission statement, then go into greater detail about Jim Ball and Prestige. We put Jim Ball first since he is currently the only face of the company, but once Jim hires more people, the Prestige about section would go first. We also added a row of photos to display pictures of his workshops, and an FAQ section.
For the Contact page, we wanted to add a short call-to-action encouraging users to book a free consultation or contact Prestige directly. The contact page would include the usual contact information (name, email, message), but it would also include a drop-down menu asking the type of inquiry. By filtering out the messages, we can target email lists towards our different target audiences.
Click on each image to get a closer look.
Homepage
About page
Contact page
Mockups
Homepage
About Page
Contact Page
Initial Build and User Testing
Once we finalized the mockups, the next step was to actually build the website. Siarra and Kate built a Wordpress template with PHP and Bootstrap, and I styled the pages with CSS. We added two more pages: the Services page and Blog page. We submitted the rough drafts, and our website draft was reviewed by our professor and the other capstone team.
Overall, we received positive feedback from our peers, who agreed that our website looked clean and aligned well with Jim’s target audience. They mainly caught styling inconsistencies, responsiveness issues, and potential accessibility problems, so we went back and fixed those in our final draft.
Final Website
Between our rough draft and final draft, the main thing we altered was the design of the Services page and blog page since we didn’t mock up those pages. We also cleaned up responsiveness and styling issues, and added plugins like a Calendly widget and a newsletter popup to increase lead conversion.
Homepage
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About page
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Contact page
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Conclusion
This capstone project was a great lesson in teamwork and time management. Working with 7 other people on the project required a lot of communication and trust, and due to our regular check-ins and open dynamic, we managed to build a brand from the bottom up in less than 4 months.
A week after our class presentations, we got an announcement from Jim saying that he chose to move forward with Prestige as his new business brand. Since he is building rapport with corporate clients, our brand best appeals to his market segment. Our professor gave our deliverables to Jim, and a few team members will hand over the website to him.
Team
Siarra Price - Graphic and web designer
Kate Watts - Web developer and research analyst
Sarah Hughey - Marketing specialist and team leader
Christine Morrison - Research and copywriting specialist
Alyssa Osorio - Communications specialist
Donisha Roberts - Communications specialist