A new and modern online presernce for a California based solar provider and installer.
SolarMax Technology, Inc. is a leading installer of Residential and Commercial solar energy systems in Southern California with own brand of Solar Panels manufactured in California. I was contacted by one of their team members to help shape up their online presence and re-design their website.
There were several problems I identified with the old website. The old website did not have a modern, clean and attractive look. Content was good but there were readability issues. The overall user experience was bad and there were no clear CTAs on any of the pages that may help with lead generation. The website was not engaging the audience at all.
The visual design was not up to the mark and was unable to give a feeling of trust and security that is needed for customers when making online purchases. The website was not mobile friendly enough to facilitate the mobile users.
The old website was very slow loading and was not built with SEO in mind. There were so many on-page SEO issues that were affecting the SERPs. The old website was built on WordPress yet the backend of the website was not easy to manage and it was difficult to edit different template parts.
The Old Website
I identified the following goals for the new redesigned website:
Apart from these overall website goals I also defined some target audience specific goals and solution which is explained below in target audience section.
To better understand what works and what doesn't in solar panel industry, I did a lot of research of competitor websites. Most of the competitor websites were old school and very busy with poor usability. So it became clear that we can only succeed if we take the opposite approach and build a website that is modern looking, and focuses on lead generation.
Various Competitor Websites
Various Competitor Websites
I defined home owners who are looking to save on electricity costs as the main user group and target audience for the new solar max website. They are prepared to spend good money on quality products and save on electricity costs by switching to solar power. They are actively seeking advice and guidance about solar panels.
I recommended development of a completely new website, built from the ground up, with a custom design to convey the value that Solar Max adds to its community.
The website will be designed to:
After finalizing target audience goals and client requirements, I started designing website.
For this project I focused completely on lead generation and conversion of visitors into customers because that was the most important thing to consider in the new design. I used various types of Call to Actions throughout the new design.
The Old Website
First things first, I started the design process with creating wireframes. Wireframes helped me in validating various page layouts and call to actions, without spending time on deciding typography and colors.
The Old Website
SolarMax wanted to stick with their existing logo, so I derived the color scheme from the logo and the result was a slightly bright yet professional and corporate looking color scheme.
For the typographic treatment, I selected a modern sans-serif font that I used throughout the website for body text. For headings I choose a bold but complimentary sans-serif.
Final result of the design process was great, have a look below.
Home Page Design
I developed the website on WordPress CMS. I spent extra time on crafting the back-end experience of the website that makes editing the website as easy as editing a word document.
I minified the code, optimized all images, leveraged browser caching, reduced server response time and passed W3C validation test. All that effort resulted in super-fast website.
I minified the code, optimized all images, leveraged browser caching, reduced server response time and passed W3C validation test. All that effort resulted in super-fast website.
I completely optimized the website for search engines using semantic coding and considering all on page SEO factors. I also used Schema Markup to help achieve higher search ranking.
I used my Famous WordPress security checklist to make the website as secure as WordPress could be. I also took good care of official WordPress coding standards.
That's not all, I have a complete list of things that I take special care of when developing WordPress websites. Click here to find out.
The new website brought in great results for SolarMax Technology. Some of the results are highlighted below:
I enjoyed working with SolarMax team and re-building the new website from scratch. I enjoyed everything from planning till going live with the new website. Now that the new website is live and generating results for the client, I’m really happy with the way this turned out.