Apixio: Brand Evolution & Website Redesign 

The Problem

The core of why they came to GRAYBOX is that their existing website didn't reflect who they were as a brand. They had a solid logo, but no real brand identity system to speak of, including a limited palette of only three colors (one of which was gray). Add that to a confusing content structure which resulted in the site generally not converting well for recruitment lead generation and their talent acquisition pursuits. A bigger reboot was in order.

The Solution

We knew Apixio wanted to do a redesign at some point when we started working with them, but adopted theit existing site and made some minor improvements to what they had. While an iterative approach can be the right one for many client-partners, you have to be able to support a more extended timeline to see results. Ultimatlely, this was too slow based on Apixio’s goals, so a full redesign was necessary.

Discovery

Started with collaborative works to really focus on who the users were that Apixio was trying to attract and what key differentiators were. While sales had a good idea, that hadn't really flowed to marketing, leading to a pretty significant disconnect, which is something we see all too often in B2B orgs.

The GRAYBOX team evaluated the competitive landscape to see what others were doing in the space. While there were some legacy players, most of the competition had set the bar really high, which drew a stark contrast between the staid look and feel of what Apixio had and the quality of their solution offerings.

It was clear in the workshops that we were keeping the logo, but that was about it. We provided a number of different mood boards to see what direction might be best for the business and how far they were willing to push things.

From a technical perspective, Apixio still very much wanted to be on WordPress, so that was a keystone system that we knew we were going to build on top of.

Design & Build

We needed to start with re-imagining the site IA, which needed to shift focus to being more solution-oriented and away from primarily technical capabilities. Kicking off the visual design process, we put together three different directions that were all potentially good evolutions of the brand overall. GRAYBOX generally takes a modular / component-based design approach to CMS buildout to give the most flexibility.

Once an overall direction was chosen, our team moved forward with designing over 30 total content blocks that could be used throughout the site. Knowing WordPress was the core CMS, we ended up leveraging Elementor Pro, which offers a comprehensive set of functionality to extend what came with the CMS, to style components and build out pages.

Keystone integrations included a continuation of Adobe Marketo for on-site landing pages for lead capture, an API-driven integration of Greenhouse for job postings/applications, and Accessibe to aid in accessibility.

Brand Iteration

Supporting the Apixio brand evolution was a wide array of new content. There was significant excitement around the new brand direction that needed to be built out in ways that folks could actually use day-to-day.

One of the critial pieces was production of a wide array of visual content that wasn’t just photograhy. Our team designed multiple “tiers” of visual storytelling elements to help reinforce this, including: simple corporate icons, more complex iconography to explain more higher-level concepts, and solution graphics to brand specific solutions. GRAYBOX also looked for moments to create movement throughout, including on-page wayfinding and subtle animations.

Capping this effort, GRAYBOX pulled together a comprehensive new brand guide that could be leveraged by both marketing and sales to support efforts on an ongoing basis.

Launch & Follow-up

Towards the end of the design and build efforts, in addition to a significant amount of new content for the site, there were legacy resources and blog posts that needed to be migrated. Since we were staying on WordPress — but opted for a clean install at the outside of this project — we were able to do the vast majority of the content migration programmatically, saving time and headache for all involved.

Last up was end-to-end testing by our QA team that included browser, functionality, form integration and analytics tests before handing to the client-partner team for final review. We wrapped the site before the holidays and ultimately opted for an early January launch so there weren’t schedule colisions with key stakeholders on both teams.