IGNiTE GOD'S LITE
What Barbi was looking for
Barbi has been offering assistance with filing for disability insurance through SSI. Her clients were mostly military, though she was not seeking to target only military personnel. Her site previously included a form to add an email address. Her process on getting that address was to manually send a "Thank you" email along with a bunch of paperwork to fill out the next time she was in the office. Barbi did not seek to increase her number of clients as she is not running a very large operation, but she did want a better looking and more focused site, a simpler way of new client intake, and to save as much money in the process as possible. (She was paying a few hundred dollars a year for hosting of a handful of static pages, mostly for a SSL certificate)
Branding
After finding that the only branding that Barbi really wanted from the previous site was the logo and the background image of the flag, we used that as the basis for rebranding the new site. The first thing I did was use the flag image as a hero image rather than a background. I simplified the color scheme from several shades of blue, yellow, and gray to just four colors; black, white, a single shade of brand blue, and one shade of accent yellow. These two changes took care of a lot of the previous issues.
Intake form
I also separated the intake form into two, one civilian and one military. This removes the appearance of favoring one over the other. I switched the form processor on the backend to Netlify forms (though will probably go another way in a future update) which is free at her volume, and allows us to offer the intake paperwork as soon as the client's email is captured, which saves her a couple of steps.
Saving money
Barbi was paying well over $200 a year just for hosting a SSL enabled site. As her backend needs were minimal (just forwarding the info collected on a single text input) this same setup can be found for much less money. I got her setup on Netlify (but will probable move her to Cloudflare Pages soon) for free, and even if her business takes off to the point where she outgrows the free plan it will still be much, much less than $200.
What made it unique
This site came with a deadline of a few weeks, as Barbi had a presentation at a conference where she wanted to show off her new site. This took place shortly after we went live, and the attendees were quite impressed with the new site.