For Viewpoints, the largest customer-driven review website, a majority of web traffic came from SEO. When Google launched their Panda update, which strove to reduce the number of low-quality websites that showed on search results pages, traffic dropped by over 50 percent overnight. The update primarily targeted content mills, plagiarized websites, and sites that were content aggregates of other websites. Viewpoints reached out to Google to explain their website was original content from actual people and not scraped from other sites. I was told that even the look of the site was a factor.

Coincidentally, I was spearheading a major rebrand for the company. When the CEO shared early mocks, Google gave immediate feedback along the lines of “yes, do that.” While the company at large knew that a rebrand was in order, this certainly validated efforts.

The existing site needed a major technical overhaul as well. Load times were at a crippling 10 seconds. I also introduced responsive web design considerations for the relaunch efforts. Here, a before and after showcases not only the identity rebrand, but a refresh of the entire content framework.