Vestus Capital

Flint is an engineer that started up a commercial real estate investment company on the side. He paid another design firm for his original website, but they ended up just using a canned template that he wasn't happy with. I completely redesigned his website from scratch to match the brand and storytelling content structure he was looking for.

In addition to refreshing the branding of the website, Flint wanted to simplify the investor sign up form and make it seem less daunting to fill out. He also wanted to feature his podcast episodes on a separate podcast page.

Finally, his original website was incredibly slow. It was bloated with too many conflicting plugins, and Flint was finding he needed to refresh the cache multiple times in order for a small percentage of his content to load at all. He was worried it was because he was using Wordpress, but I assured him that wasn't normal. I was able to build him a completely new, fully functional website with great load times.

The original homepage design Flint received from a previous design agency was essentially a canned template that they used for multiple websites. It didn't quite achieve the branding he was looking for, and was frankly quite a messy design.

Flint wanted a brand that invited trust & confidence, showed that he was an expert, and also portrayed a certain friendliness. Investing can be a scary topic for some people, so it was important to seem as approachable as possible.

I achieved a friendly feel by choosing a humanist sans-serif font for the headings, which means that the font mimics handwriting. Vestus Capital is also meant to feel family-oriented, which is why I chose a humanist font.

In order to achieve the trust & confidence Flint was after, I picked a serif that radiated modernity and precision. The type of investments Vestus Capital offers is a new spin on things, which is why I picked a font that was both stable feeling as well as fresh.

I also picked a solid, straight line motif to use throughout the site to portray a sense of solidness and stability.

The original application for investors to sign up was long and involved reading a lot of OR statements. Flint was concerned that he was losing potential customers due to the form being long and confusing.

I redesigned the form to feel quicker & simpler to fill out by adding in multiple stages with a progress bar. This way, the website visitor wouldn't feel overwhelmed right out of the gate with a long page of choices. I also made the form dynamic, so specific questions were only visible if they were relevant to that individual.

I designed a new podcasts page for Flint's website. Instead of hosting his own podcast, Flint appears on other people's podcasts, so that presented a challenge of each podcast being hosted on its own platform.

In designing the page, I included dynamic link options. So if a podcast was listed on spotify, youtube, and apple podcasts it would have links to all three. If another podcast was listed only on youtube, it would only have a youtube link. Similarly, if a podcast had a transcript available, I included a link to that as well.

While I was building out the website, Flint found a new investment opportunity and wanted to create a page to showcase that. So I created a dedicated page to show off this new opportunity, and prompted website visitors to trade their contact information for the full investment summary.

I connected all the forms on Flint's website, including this one, to Active Campaign so he could keep track of potential clients. I also managed automations so he would be notified of new potential clients and send them automated emails.

Flint was really impressed with how quickly I was able to build out his new website - especially compared to how long it took for his previous design company to work. He's happy with the redesign and has referred me out to his network. I plan to continue to work with Flint if he needs help down the road with adding new website features.