Shenandoah Valley Partnership Website Redesign Case Study

The Challenge

Identify areas to improve user experience (UX)

The Shenandoah Valley Partnership (SVP) suspected that they could be getting more from their website, even if they weren’t exactly sure how to define what that should be. They had undertaken a redesign the year before, but weren’t seeing the engagement they wanted.

We performed a complete website audit and delivered a set of strategic recommendations.

Improve Performance

Even though the design wasn’t old, the website wasn’t delivering the kind of results that the Shenandoah Valley Partners team expected, and too many website visitors were leaving.

Improve Mobile User Experience

Portions of the site were broken due to mobile-responsive issues. That content wasn’t being seen by many visitors, and since Google rewards sites that are mobile-responsive, rankings were being impacted.

"They were able to take our existing website and further develop the sitemap, features, and more, in an affordable and timely manner. I am also developing a separate website with their team and they have been very responsive to our budget and timeline, and are building the site infrastructure in a way where we can easily expand in the future. Their Senior UX/UI Designer holds me accountable for deadlines and speaks my non-website language, helping me feel comfortable in making decisions."

Cari Sinnett Shenandoah Valley Partnership

Our Solution

The data tells the story: listen and adjust course

Many companies we work with think that once you make your site look better, it will naturally perform better too. But when design decisions aren’t rooted in data, they rely on assumptions about user interactions that are often wrong. A comprehensive audit let us make data-driven recommendations based on what was and wasn’t working. It included assessing traffic trends and visitor flows; reviewing user recordings, heatmaps, scroll maps, and click overlays to understand how people were engaging with pages; and pulling confetti reports to understand what the click activity meant.

Diving Into Traffic & User Flow

We dug into Google Analytics to evaluate how visitors were navigating the site. We found that the exit rate was too high, and felt that the information architecture of the navigation could be improved.

Analyzing Engagement Data

We implemented tracking to visualize user data in the form of heatmaps, scroll maps and click overlays. This research provided clear insights into which content was engaged with most and least.

Identifying Strategic Fixes

We made (and then implemented) recommendations for their mobile-responsive issues. We also moved their Featured Properties from PDFs that were ignored by search engines into easily-searchable HTML content.

The Result

A Redesigned Website Built on Data-Driven Insights

We delivered an actionable list of recommendations to address UX and technical issues, based on our research and experience in UX design.

The team at Shenandoah Valley Partnership was so excited by the findings that they hired us to implement them using a phased approach.

To improve visitor flow and reduce exits, we restructured the information architecture and introduced cross navigation. We added calls-to-action throughout the site to drive conversions, moved their featured properties into HTML that could be crawled by search engines, and refreshed design elements on the homepage and interior pages.

After just four months with our redesigned site, it reported a 54% increase in pageviews, a 20% increase in entrances and a 22% decrease in exit rates compared to the same period the year prior.