A Friendship Beyond Workplace Safety
Seventh Scout is proud to have a long legacy of supporting the critical work and training being done at COVE: Center of Visual Expertise. This non-profit, based out of the Toledo Museum of Art, teaches visual literacy for workplace safety. Their promise of “Seeing a Safer Tomorrow” helps create workplace environments that reduces risks and saves lives.
Our work with COVE entails both personal and professional aspects. Let’s start with Seventh Scout Founder Rhodes Gibson and Kristin Zinkl, Seventh Scout’s Resident HubSpot Guru and COVE’s Marketing Director. This dynamic duo’s friendship spans back to their days working at BST (now DEKRA Insight) in 2008.
Together, they embarked on creating the original COVE website in 2018. At the time, the HubSpot page builder platform simplified website maintenance, eliminating the demand for expert coding skills. Kristin’s history as a HubSpot guru made it a natural choice to construct the website on this platform.
After five years, our teams found some limitations with HubSpot hosting and site management. COVE approached Seventh Scout for solutions to these problems. Join us as we unravel the intricacies of rebuilding the COVE website utilizing Elementor Pro while maintaining all of the HubSpot functionality, creating an online experience where personal connections meet professional expertise and the pursuit of a seamless digital journey takes center stage.
Previous COVE Website
HubSpot vs. WordPress & Elementor
Seventh Scout migrated the COVE website from HubSpot to WordPress, effectively addressing the limitations that had previously posed challenges. The move from HubSpot to WordPress wasn’t just about the underlying page builder; it was a deliberate step towards unlocking the true potential of COVE’s online presence.
Limitations of HubSpot Website Builder:
- Complex Site Architecture Management: Managing and organizing the site’s architecture became increasingly challenging for COVE as they expanded their content. The original HubSpot template proved insufficient, resulting in a disparate appearance among pages.
- Poor Performance Metrics: COVE encountered numerous issues and saw low metrics on their website due to limitations associated with the HubSpot website builder analytics.
- Limited Responsiveness: HubSpot’s constraints prevented COVE from achieving the desired level of responsiveness and mobile-friendliness on its website. Implementing motion graphics was also not an option within the platform’s limitations.
By leveraging the power of the Elementor page builder, Seventh Scout not only eliminated the obstacles that once hindered progress but also ushered in a new era of creative freedom and enhanced functionality.
As a HubSpot partner, we understand that we need to provide our clients with the right tools at the right time for them to be able to utilize them. It's a great resource, but you may not need to use every tool and feature HubSpot offers.
Seventh Scout skillfully harnessed the HubSpot and WordPress integration, seamlessly merging HubSpot’s suite of inbound marketing tools, ‘gated’ content access, and campaign management into the WordPress ecosystem. This symbiotic relationship ensured a cohesive user experience, enabling visitors to explore content, engage with campaigns, and access ‘gated’ content without interruption. We preserved valuable inbound marketing metrics by uniting HubSpot’s analytical power with WordPress’s dynamic capabilities.
Goals:
- Platform Upgrade: A shift to a platform that breathes flexibility while offering a more robust and impactful online experience.
- Streamline Maintenance: Simplify website maintenance to ensure it remains easy to manage while empowering COVE’s team to make updates and changes confidently.
- Information Architecture Overhaul: The restructuring of the site’s information architecture emerges as the cornerstone, promising holistic navigation while prioritizing providing visitors with a seamless and enjoyable experience for visitors.
- The Human Touch: Infuse the website with elements that resonate with the audience, humanizing the brand’s identity. Elevate the website’s visual aesthetics for an engaging user experience.
Responsive Design and Dynamic Navigation
In our collaborative effort with COVE, a clear strategy emerged to address their content-related challenges. We initiated a comprehensive content audit, meticulously identifying crucial content and eliminating duplications. This audit laid the groundwork for a more streamlined and effective content structure.
One of the pivotal aspects of our work involved the transformation of COVE’s resource center, which encompassed a variety of valuable materials like white papers, blogs, and webinars. Together, we envisioned a user-friendly interface, integrating filters for content types, topics, and more. The reimagined resource center now offers visitors a more intuitive and efficient way to access the information they seek.
One struggle we originally had was making it easy for users to actually understand what it is we do at COVE. Our original website almost had too much information and wasn't laid out in a comprehensive manner. This new site does a much better job of helping the users know where to go and how to find the information that speaks to them and their needs. Seventh Scout did an amazing job of taking all of our content and featuring it in a clear and concise message that makes it easier for users to navigate through and find what they need.
COVE also had a clear vision for how they wanted to communicate their services through the website’s information architecture. With the incorporation of the Elementor website builder for WordPress, the website not only became more responsive and mobile-friendly but also took on a dynamic and engaging quality. Motion graphics were introduced to enhance the overall user and navigation experience, making it more captivating for visitors. This transition marked a significant step forward in COVE’s digital journey, where their objectives were met with ingenuity and expertise.
Vision for Communicating Services
I understood who COVE is and what they offer from the HubSpot website, but I got a sense of what the online brand could look like by reviewing print collateral and the brand identity guidelines. I wanted to bring that to life.
New COVE Website
Measurable Results in Authenticity
In our website rebuild project, we aspire to achieve several key objectives.
- Streamline the COVE services menu by presenting a more concise and user-friendly navigation experience.
- Enhance the visual appeal of our website by exploring the captivating power of web development to create an engaging platform.
- Humanize the COVE brand by crafting content that resonates authentically with our audience and fostering a more friendly and relatable online presence.
These goals collectively drive our mission to provide visitors with a seamless, visually appealing, and emotionally resonant experience.
Positive Outcomes
Increase In Organic Search Traffic
Increase In Website Users
B
Website Performance Score Post Launch. Improved from F Score by GT Metrix.
