Client
Prosperity Enterprises
Year
2023
Industry
Finance
Services
WordPress Maintenance
Website Design
Search Engine Optimisation
Introduction
Earlier this year, we had the awesome opportunity to redesign Prosperity Enterprises’ website for Jaco Grobbelaar in collaboration with Pauline du Preez from Flair Foundry and Mignionette Fair from Edita Services
It was a great experience because of the people we worked with, and it was challenging because Prosperity Enterprises grew tremendously as a company in a couple of years and needed their website redesigned to reflect this growth.
About Prosperity Enterprises
Prosperity Enterprises is a well-known educational and wealth structuring company that empowers individuals to create financial freedom through property. They specialise in property investment, trust structuring and accounting, and financial education and much more.
About Jaco Grobbelaar
Jaco founded Prosperity Enterprises with a vision to be the leading property structuring and property investment company in South Africa. Jaco is a CFA Chart holder and successful property investor, published author, and international speaker.
You’ve probably seen him present property investment seminars with Private Property and exhibit and speak at The Property Show.
Approach
Before we start to build or design a website, we spend at least a week (sometimes two weeks) dedicated to research and planning. This involves crawling through social media accounts and going through CI guides, presentations, and any other digital or print material that’s available. If needed, we also have conversations with the staff about the day-to-day operations of the business because they will have a good idea of what their clients need.
A challenge we had in terms of the design was to make the website stand out from everyone else and to avoid the website looking bland and generic. Additionally, we wanted the website to communicate Prosperity Enterprises’ services as much as possible while avoiding information overload.
We couldn’t draw any inspiration for the design locally because, honestly, the majority of South African websites are boring. It’s always the same paragraph layouts, generic 4 block milestone counters, generic stock images, and boring sliders and hero sections.
So, we decided to look at design ideas of websites from international companies that were either directly and indirectly related to a similar industry as Prosperity Enterprises.
Website Redesign
Besides their old website having a dark (although dark was trendy back then) and now outdated design, the main problem with their old website was that it made Prosperity Enterprises seem small and come across as only offering property investment seminars.
The redesign had to showcase and communicate all of their service offerings including their story about why they exist and who they are.
We like using words to help us with our design direction and to keep on track during the entire process. We had five words in mind when it came to the design of the website:
- Big
- Bold
- Minimal
- Clean
- Human
We paid close attention to all the small things such as the layout, navigation, typography, and colour to make sure every element of the website was aligned with each other. We also made sure to include as much white space as possible between all the elements.
Website Structure, Layout and Navigation
It was challenging to provide as much information as possible on the website without it becoming cluttered and making visitors feel overwhelmed.
Here’s a screenshot of their old website’s homepage.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
Below is a screenshot of their website’s redesigned homepage:
Click on the image to enlarge it.
Color Palette
We believe that colour is one of the most underrated components when it comes to web design. Although we were provided with a set of colours from their company profile, we felt it was important to introduce at least one additional colour.
The chosen “green-bordering-blue” colour that you see on their website came from the following the words we had in mind:
- Sleek
- Professional
- Energy
- Youth
- Money
One of the websites we used was Color Hex that helped us cycle through countless different shades and tints until we arrived at the correct one.
Typography
Typography is another underrated and unappreciated component.
We settled on using Open Sans and Montserrat as the typefaces with different variations, specifically going for large and bold fonts. The blog font size was also increased quite a bit to make reading much easier on mobile devices.
Functionality
The website was redesigned with standard functionality as you would expect from any website.
An important function that Jaco needed was to sell his property investment book directly from the website. WooCommerce was used to provide the shop functionality and PayFast was integrated to provide the payment gateway.
We also made it so that when a visitor clicked on “order book” it took them directly to the checkout page. This was done to reduce that additional step of having to click on the cart icon after clicking on order.
Mobile Friendly
We looked at a year’s worth of website analytics data and saw that the majority of their visitors came from mobile devices.
Although we implemented a responsive design, we also physically viewed all the pages on our mobile devices and adjusted each page accordingly to make sure it was mobile-friendly.
Migrating existing content
The old website had a ton of articles which included tables, graphs, and photos that needed to be migrated. A big worry about a website redesign is potentially losing your website’s current ranking on Google Search because of the many changes that your website undergoes.
We made sure to keep the impact on critical pages and sections of the website to a minimum such as the headings and URLs.
Speed and Hosting
Their old website was on a shared hosting package that wasn’t going to be able to support the redesign anymore. We advised them to move over to a managed WordPress hosting solution that also provided LiteSpeed.
The difference in their website’s speed was night and day and their web hosting cost only increased by R35.00 per month.
Graphic Design and Artwork
The graphic design and artwork was handled by Pauline du Preez from Flair Foundry.
We stayed away from using generic stock images for the redesign. The issue with generic stock images is that anyone can get a hold of them and because the range of the images is limited, you often accidentally lock yourself into a “specific set of images” that restrains your design.
We shared our inspiration for the visual elements with Pauline that we got from the research phase, and she was able to take it even further.
Content and Copywriting
The content was written by Jaco, and the copywriting was handled by Mignionette Fair from Edita Services.
A frequently asked questions section was placed at the bottom of each service page. This was needed because it helps to address visitor doubts around a service and also provides them with necessary information without them having to contact someone for basic questions and answers.
Originally, we wanted each service page to tell a story. For example, the trust structuring service page would tell a story of person A who placed their property in a trust, and person B who didn’t and the pros and cons of it. The reasoning for this was simple: finance is complicated and instead of telling visitors about the definition or ins and outs of the service we could demonstrate the service in a real-world scenario.
Sadly this didn’t work out as we thought, and Jaco and Mignionette took care of the content for the website.
Launch
Nearing the launch date of the website, all of us thought we still had at least two weeks left but we were wrong. Jaco let us know that he was going to be on the cover of Real Estate Investor Magazine in a couple of days and the website had to be ready before then.
Luckily at that point, the website was about 90% complete. In around three days we had to wrap up important sections of the website, remove parts that weren’t as essential, and transfer the website to the new hosting provider.
It was quite stressful but all of us made it in time!
Outcome
We kept an eye on their Google Search Console property in the coming days and adjusted the website accordingly. Their website didn’t experience any losses in their Google Search ranking, and their organic traffic increased with additional search terms.
This is due to the redesign keeping as much of the original structure as possible and the quality content that was written by Jaco and Mignionette for the additional pages.
Jaco was extremely happy with the results from the website redesign and continues to make incremental changes and improvements to his website with our monthly website maintenance packages.