Marketing Website Refresh
2022
Introduction
Our team worked with Stack’s Demand Generation and Product Marketing teams, as well as two freelancers, to refresh the brand and user experience of Stack Overflow’s marketing site. This includes refreshing all of the web presence for Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow Advertising, and Stack Overflow Talent.
Our goal was to de-clutter our existing homepage, product homepages, and site navigation, focus on specific, customer-focused selling points of the product, and legitimize Stack Overflow’s market presence beyond stackoverflow.com.
Initial Exploration
We began by identifying what about our site was causing problems.
Our key findings were a lack of a continuous user journey, too many exit paths, and confusion around page hierarchy and our product ecosystem. The homepage and sub-page navigations weren’t clearly organized and included way too many links to other Stack Overflow properties, making the whole page feel cluttered.
Wireframes & Navigation
To begin somewhere, I created basic wireframes and new navigation menus. This gave our team the chance to explore new ideas and start asking questions.
What felt necessary for describing, depicting, and marketing the product? What are visitors to this site trying to solve? How can we help visitors understand Stack Overflow for Teams without minimizing or oversimplifying its strength?
Hiring Copywriter, Testing Illustration Styles
We reached out to a copywriter to host collaborative sessions, where marketing teams at Stack worked together to gather data on our tone and messaging.
At the same time, Dave and I were further refining our illustration approach, going with two freelancers we’d worked with before on our Blog and asking them to help us build hero visuals and spots.
Developing our Motion Language
I took illustrations from our two freelancers and got to work. I wanted to fully develop how motion would feel for Stack Overflow’s marketing materials — on our site and in campaigns. We kept movement fast, legible, and bubbly.
Click into each video above to begin playback.
Conclusion
This project was incredibly formative for our brand.
This was a major effort from several teams and resulted in a stronger identity for Stack Overflow for Teams, a stronger identity for Stack Overflow Advertising, major improvements to the overall stackoverflow.co site, and, after launch, it proved to be a success for our company — from our CEO’s weekly update email:
“Last week was a big week for inbound contact form fills from our new website. We saw our best week ever for SALs [Sales-Accepted Leads] from organic contact form fills, which historically has been our top source for qualified pipeline. The main contributor to the lift was our site’s conversion rate growing more than 2x.”
Later on, results indicated that this continued increase in conversion rate created millions in pipeline in the first six months post-launch. Given our team of two on brand, plus hiring two freelancers to help us reach the finishing line, the net monetary gain and time investment from this project compared to if we outsourced to an agency is extremely rewarding.