Ayming is a global business performance organisation working in the finance sector that has been operating across 15 countries for more than 30 years.

Ayming’s existing global website suite was failing to meet internal expectations and didn’t effectively reflect the brand, their approach and their culture. It was also ineffective in converting and nurturing their wide-ranging audience (with evolving needs and characteristics) across a diverse range of services that differ from country to country.

The websites were falling short of:

• Offering favourable user experiences in multiple countries.
• Performing to SEO performance standards and expectations.
• Presenting Ayming as an innovative leader in a competitive consulting space.

Ayming chose Elixirr Digital as their agency partner for this web project, as well as for ongoing marketing activity. Our goal was to successfully deliver a brand new suite of global sites that would address the problems faced by the existing group of sites. Needless to say, we were up to the challenge!

The challenge

Our challenge was to create a suite of international sites that would deliver a user experience suitable for disparate customer groups in different countries, with nuances in user behaviour and goals, and a strong focus on lead generation. We also wanted to make sure that organic search was a core consideration, with a seamless migration approach carried out before, during and after launch.

During the lifespan of this project, Ayming entered into a brand development process. We made sure we were reactive to this by working closely with them as part of their brand development team.

In collaboration with Ayming, we identified the following critical success factors:

• A suite of responsive websites that would cater for users across all relevant devices.
• User-centric websites that would serve user needs and desires, whilst also meeting Ayming’s commercial goals.
• A delightful user experience, with intuitive journeys to relevant content and beyond.
• A website with a focus on lead generation, guiding users through the website and into the sales funnel.
• An engaging resource hub that would position Ayming as an inspirational thought leader and promote user engagement and sharing.
• Seamless integration with 3rd party systems such as Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud.
• A website that would stand up to Google’s expectations from a technical SEO perspective.
• A website suite that would cater for multi-lingual functionality.
• An easy-to-use CMS that would cater for the needs of internal users in multiple country marketing teams with differing skillsets, whilst being scalable and flexible for future growth.

The project

Research

We begin every project we undertake with a thorough and in-depth research phase. This provides us with the business requirements, data and user insight required to build a website that is truly fit for purpose and exceeds expectations.

To build a complete picture of Ayming and their users, it was essential that we engaged key stakeholders from each country, as well as reviewing all the existing available data.

To achieve this, we used a range of research techniques, including:

• Surveys
• Telephone interviews
• Online polls
• Face-to-face interviews
• Workshops
• Data review – utilising a range of tools and sources
• Competitor research

UX Design

This involved a two day collaborative workshop between Ayming and our UX specialists, as well as a designer and developer from the Elxirr Digital team. We flew in a core steering group made up of representatives from six countries, which was used as a forum to:

• Present the user research findings
• Develop an early plan for the information architecture (IA)
• Create user personas
• Visualise the sitemap using a card sorting exercise
• Sketch wireframes
• Establish a design direction

This was also all presented to Ayming’s senior stakeholders – their Chairman and CEO – via conference calls.

Post-workshop, the collected findings were used to create a fully functioning prototype with an interactive format that allowed for user testing and rapid iterations. This was a vital part of our process as it allowed us to eliminate the possibility of timely and expensive changes further into the project.

Once the prototype was signed-off, final design decisions were made, supporting the brand development process. Concepts were created for responsive pages, followed by the creation of templates – international feedback and amends were also factored into this phase. Our design team were in constant contact with stakeholders in 12 countries during this process, to ensure everyone across the company was in agreement on the direction of the design.

Build

This is where our talented team of developers took over. WordPress had been selected as the best CMS for the task based on these features:

This stage involved:

• Core and agreed features development for main website.
• The creation of 2 boilerplate sites – 1 multi-language and 1 single language.
• Roll out of 12 local sub-sites.
• Tracking setup/form integration.
• Testing/bug fixing.
• CMS Training – for each country. Our developers created a series of 4 webinars, which were recorded to aid in this process.
• SEO support.

Finally, we had our senior SEO specialists on hand throughout the build process to ensure a smooth transition from old sites to new. We have a robust and proven approach when it comes to pre-launch SEO, which minimises the risk of organic rankings degradation.

This also puts the sites in the best possible position for our continued marketing efforts, as Ayming UK’s proud SEO, PPC and Display partner.