Lis Luis

Case study · Brand systems & product

Self-Serve Websites

Regional brand systems for community banks

RoleSenior product designer
TeamDesign, PM, engineering, marketing
ClientsSmall and mid-sized banks
Year2023

In six months

326%

growth in recurring revenue from annual hosting fees after launch

  • 92clients renewed in year one
  • 23new clients signed
  • 6more in contract

June to December 2023. Business results, shaped by sales and pricing as well as design.

Three of the regional template styles on real devices: Rustic with a farm hero on a laptop, Chevron on a phone with a landscape hero, and Revolve with bold geometric shapes on a laptop and phone.

The business problem

Small and mid-sized banks used the product to build and run their own websites. Growth had stalled and clients were leaving.

For clients

Too much work to look good

Banks needed flexible, easy-to-use website tools. The product took too much effort to get a polished result without a creative team on staff.

For the business

Low renewals, low visibility

An outdated self-serve experience made the product harder to adopt and easier to leave, and renewals were holding back growth.

The insight

Ease of use was the value

For non-technical clients deciding whether to keep paying, how easy it was to use shaped how much they thought it was worth.

What the research showed

I went to the banks paying for the product and to the sales team trying to sell it.

Client interviews

Their site didn't look like them

Banks told us the templates didn't fit their community or their customers. A farm lender and a city bank were being handed the same look.

Sales tickets

Region kept coming up

Requests and objections from sales pointed to the same gap: banks wanted a site that matched their region and identity, and the generic templates got in the way.

Who edits the site

Not designers. Not developers.

The people updating these sites were bank staff, often not tech-savvy, with no creative team to lean on. Anything that looked complicated didn't get used.

So the job was two things at once: make it look like their bank, and make it easy enough that anyone on staff could keep it that way.

The solution

One product, 10 personalities

A community bank's website is its storefront, so I treated churn as a brand problem, not just a usability one. I designed a range of 10 styles. The regional ones take their cues from how banks in each part of the country already show up: their customers, their landscape, their local look.

  • RusticFarm country
  • RevolveEast Coast
  • ChevronMountain West
  • Purple styleMid-Atlantic
  • Green stylePacific Northwest
  • Black styleSouthwest

The full range, all designed by me

  • Rustic
  • Revolve
  • Chevron
  • Capacity
  • Stacks
  • Curves
  • Landscape
  • Flat
  • Sauber
  • Switch

Farm country

Rustic

Conservative patterns, warm earth tones and familiar stock imagery for institutions rooted in agriculture.

Rustic template: mobile pages, loan cards on a gingham pattern with farm photography, and a homepage hero with a tractor.

East Coast

Revolve

Bolder color, geometric shapes and subtle curves for banks that want to look modern and expressive.

Revolve template: a mobile hero with bold geometric shapes, a content card and the homepage on laptop and phone.

Mountain West

Chevron

Warmer colors and pointed forms that echo the landscape, with a pattern system that carries across sections.

Chevron template: a mobile homepage with a pointed hero over a landscape photo, and chevron pattern components.

The full range

All 10 styles, designed by me, from farm-country warm to clean and minimal, each built on the same set of components.

Template style 1 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 2 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 3 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 4 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 5 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 6 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 7 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 8 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 9 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.Template style 10 of 10 shown on a laptop and phone with placeholder bank content.

Shown with placeholder content.

One system underneath

Each style is a skin, not a separate product. The building blocks banks actually need, like product cards, services, news, rates, calculators and branch locations, were designed once and restyled for each template. That kept the range cheap to grow and easy for clients to edit, whichever style they picked.

Reusable components: product category tiles, a services card, a news carousel and a grid of product cards.
Shared components, shown in one style. Copy is placeholder.

Live on real bank sites

Banks took the templates and made them their own, with their own photography, colors and voice, without needing a designer. Farm lenders, ranch-country banks, small-town and city banks, all on the same system.

A sample of client sites. Bank names, logos and local details are blurred for privacy.

What I did

  • Framed the churn as a value problem, not only a usability problem.
  • Redesigned the self-serve experience so non-technical staff could build and edit their site with confidence.
  • Designed all 10 template styles, including the regional Rustic, Revolve and Chevron, so banks could choose a style that matched their identity and audience.
  • Designed the shared component system under every style, so the range could grow without each style becoming its own product.

The regional template idea was mine, along with the overall approach. I worked with a product manager, engineering, marketing and client stakeholders.

Why it matters

It's brand work with a business number attached: a template range shaped by regional identity, inside a product clients were deciding whether to keep paying for.