Yesterday marked the day for the launch of website redesign Project of mine, Ferrellgas.com [cheers, loud noises!]. These guys are the leading retail propane company in the U.S. and are a publically traded Fortune 1000 company. Just to back up a bit first- for those of you who may not know, I work at Digital Evolution Group. We’re a 30′ish person e-consultancy in which I lead the concepting, design and implementation of Projects (largely website focused). I really love what I do and who I work with- no day is ever the same. It’s awesome.

Anyways, back to the website launch. The short and sweet gist is we were tasked to redesign the website in order to satisfy the organization’s marketing and overall strategic goals. Their old website did not completely fulfill these basic, mission critical needs. Furthermore, the overall aesthetic of their old website wasn’t reflective of the fact they service over 1 million customers nationwide (they’re a big deal).

This is the old website (left) vs. redesigned website (right)

So we focused on formulating a plan by integrating objectives from all aspects of the organization- not just marketing and sales. This meant meeting with every department in the organization and understanding internal objectives and the customer perspective as well.

In addition, we analyzed the persona of the visitors to Ferrellgas.com. We believe that every successful web project prioritizes the end-user experience above all else. As such, you must design the website from the end-user’s perspective.

This is what a persona is by our definition: “A persona incorporates the demographic and psychographic attributes of a type of website end-user (“target audience”), as well as that end-user type’s context of visit, expectations, and business situation.”

If you just use demographics or target audiences to design a website — you are likely to find yourself short changing or leaving your visitors with an unfulfilled experience when they visit your site. By identifying persona you are able to take it a step further by understanding needs and context of the users visit (download a free whitepaper I wrote about Persona here).

For Ferrellgas, we identified that our primary personas that guided the design of the website were;

1. Prospective residential/business customers
2. Existing residential/business customers
3. Potential employees

That said, I’m extremely proud of the execution and output- it’s reflective of a smart, clean, customer focused website that fulfills the expectations of our personas. Check it out and let me know your thoughts at www.ferrellgas.com!
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