# Financial website design
EFM Financial Management
User-led thinking: designing to ensure clarity of information
Insight
EFM is a nationwide team of Finance Directors and Business Advisors, who provide practical commercial support to help businesses grow.
We created a financial website design for EFM, that enables different user groups to navigate quickly and easily to the most relevant information.
Branding
We began by refreshing the EFM logo design and producing clear brand guidelines for EFM, which provided a starting point for a fresh financial website design.
The EFM brand went on to incorporate EFM Growth and EFM Scotland and Ireland.
What our client said
Great web design and development. I have worked with Union 10 Design on several web projects. They're easy to deal with, knowledgeable and creative, and offer great advice and support. Highly recommended.
Greg Stewart // EFM Financial Management
User-led web design
Our next challenge was to grasp the competing needs of EFM’s target audiences. With a large amount of content and services to communicate, we needed to ensure users could access relevant information quickly and easily.
We created a design that delivers clear navigation and uses colour-coding to signpost users to relevant content. To sense-check our thinking, we provided wireframes for EFM to test-drive the user flow and navigation, prior to building the website.
Web development
We customised the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) to suit EFM’s specific requirements, adding a number of functions and features to support their business goals.
1. Lead capture
To generate quality leads via the website, we created a series of health-check forms, quizzes and other data-capture methods to encourage user interaction and connect with potential customers.
We linked WordPress to ERM’s internal CRM system to automatically pass leads from the website into their marketing systems – saving time and streamlining internal processes.
2. Independence and efficiency
Our customised version of WordPress provided EFM with the tools required to independently manage their website in the future.
We also redeveloped existing FAQ and Glossary features, to make adding and updating this type of content more efficient for the EFM team.
3. Features
Key design features, such as the home page’s animated stats are managed simply in the CMS, to ensure EFM can keep them relevant and up to date.
We provided tools to create and colour-code new pages, to maintain a consistent look and feel as the website evolves over time.
A central system for updating ‘call to action’ blocks was developed for EFM to make global changes, rather than multiple changes – a great time saver.
Using Google Maps, we created a dynamic locations page to show EFM’s offices. We coded the map, to make it easy for the EFM team to add new locations, as their business expands.
4. Optimisation
EFM’s previous website was slow to load and didn’t perform well across different devices. By streamlining WordPress to meet EFM’s needs, we improved site speed and our responsive design ensured the site performs perfectly across mobile, tablet and PC devices.
