Our brand – new CheMondis Website – An Interview with Anna, Uros and Vincent
Last week we launched our new website! We are very proud and excited about it and the whole team worked really hard to deliver the best results. We sat down and talked with Anna, our Marketing Designer, Uros, our Product Designer, and Vincent, our Marketing Manager, for a behind-the-scenes look.
The new website looks great. Could you explain why you initiated the rebranding and redesign?
U: A few months ago, our team started talking about how we can improve our website experience for both existing customers as well as new ones who aren’t as familiar with who we are and what we do.
We had realized we needed to make several changes: Improve user experiences, update the content, and move to a mobile-first approach due to recent search-engine algorithm prioritization.
V: Moreover, our previous website was created almost a year ago when our mission and features were not as clear and developed as they are now. Today, CheMondis is the largest and fastest-growing marketplace for chemicals and offers Instant Deals, Agreements, Credit Rating, simplified Ordering processing, Document Management and so much more.
You get a lot from that initial feeling you have when visiting a website for the first time, and that wasn’t immediately evident in our previous website. When we started the rethinking of our website, we focused on highlighting our holistic platform with all new features using clear visuals to help explain what we do.
The three of you are pretty new in the company. Why were you attracted by the project, and what were your main areas of focus in your first few months?
V: Well, it’s an interesting time for CheMondis, and I’m personally glad about where we’re headed as a company and marketplace. As we have slowly moved into becoming the leading B2B marketplace for the chemical industry, we needed to make sure that our website, marketing, and content merge into a single coherent narrative.
A: For us, the main motivation was to create an even better CheMondis experience for our customers around the world. That is really what drew us most to the project. In the first few weeks, we set our focus around three ideas. We aimed to:
- transform our visitors’ experience, for the better, on our landing page,
- Incubate new ideas and visual elements that would bring innovation in the industry,
- and support the evolution of our marketplace in the long run.
Could you talk me through the design process of the website?
U: To start, the product design team had very minimal information on the current visitors’ base. So this is what we wanted to find out more about. Analytics data was very minimal, and not enough to get a clear understanding of visitors’ behavior.
So, the first thing we did, organized a few design meetings and interviews with most of the internal stakeholders. This helped us to understand external visitors better and from that, we started building the skeleton for our new website. Which we filled with life later along the process.
Did you already use some prototypes for the redesign at that point?
A: Well, in parallel to the “persona” work being done in these workshops, we also started an audit of our current website and others in the industry. This helped us understand the needs, pain points, and easy fixes that we could leverage during the redesign. Now that we had a good idea of who our visitors were, and what types of sites they were regularly visiting, we could start ideating.
We started sketching out wireframes to determine the look and feel of the website. These wireframes went through multiple rounds of feedback. Once they were approved, we jumped into designing the actual pages and creating prototypes.
Using prototypes, became a convenient way to build out the actual website and helped us to streamline the process. This greatly reduced the amount of time to make tweaks to the design.
What were the biggest challenges?
U: One of our key design challenges was to make sure that our website looked good on all devices and browsers. Our visitors are using a wide range of them, often including outdated versions that are not optimized to render today’s websites.
That means we worked hard to ensure CheMondis looks comfortable and behaves in familiar ways on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Chrome, Internet Explorer and more.
For example, we respected platform conventions for responsiveness, grid-based layout, button ordering, typography, and more because we wanted CheMondis to feel and look the same on all your devices. Basically, we want users to recognize it, no matter where and how you encounter it.
V: Another challenge was the time constraint. We wanted the new website rather sooner than later, and so did all of our internal stakeholders. So, it became important to us to clearly set expectations and time-box the feedback rounds in order to be able to iterate on the website in fast cycles.
Feedbacks were essentially important for us as you get a reality check on your redesign from your team, even before you deploy your redesign to the outside world.
What are your favorite features or areas of the new website?
A: The new career and about us pages for sure. These pages needed to get a good redesign for visitors to fully understand who is behind CheMondis and how we decided to develop an entirely new business model for the chemical industry rethinking traditional sales and marketing.
In a nutshell
To conclude, revamping the main pages, creating a polished new design services page, enhanced brand image, and a clearer value proposition will definitely bring a higher affinity of users to associate with our brand.
There was a lot more to this project that we could have shared with you, but it might take another 3,000 words to do so. We hope you enjoy the updated face of CheMondis.
Now it is up to you
What do you think of our Redesign? Do you like our new static page? What’s your favorite part? Let us know and leave a comment in the section below!
Thank´s for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.