Overview.

Mortgage Professionals Canada

How do you renovate a website without needing to remortgage?

This is a story about a website that was in a state of disrepair and an organization that relied on said website for everything. Mortgage Professionals Canada (MPC), is the country's leading mortgage industry association with more than 15,000 members and 1,000 member firms. With hundreds of thousands of web visitors each year, their reach is extensive, and their website provides the backbone for all their offerings, services, events and advocacy work. Grounding our working relationship in the right context was essential. We wanted to earn their trust and demonstrate that with Sitefinity we could build something capable of exceeding their expectations. We started by performing a health check on their existing site and addressing some quick fixes. With that foundation in place, Flywheel got the go-ahead for a full site redesign. The new website needed to be functional, efficient, and have finesse. Challenge accepted.

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Gather.

Start with understanding the structure you’re working with.

The existing MPC website was showing its age, lacked speed and functionality, and didn’t represent the professionalism of the organization. The client even likened it to a “spam site.” Something they were not too proud of - rather than something that worked to amplify their offerings. We knew that while a lot of people relied on this site, only a few were tasked with its upkeep. Our full-service offering would take the pressure off their small team and provide solutions they could easily navigate. The client brought in some of their external partners, people who had worked with them in the past and were now clients, to help us better understand the pain points on the existing site. This was an enlightening process that led to some great breakthroughs.

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Shape.

With a solid plan, even the most ambitious renovation is achievable.

We took the information we learned and molded it into a structure, wireframe, mock-ups, design system and ultimately provided a comprehensive plan. We knew they wanted to simplify user experience and navigation, organizing things in a way that would get users to the pages they needed – simply and efficiently. Our work included building out a mood board to help them augment their brand and avoid starting from scratch. We demonstrated Sitefinity’s multi-site capabilities, allowing two sites to live in one world – leveraging shared components and functionality, while styling them differently. Critically, we also had to break the plan into phases to hit a critical delivery date and support their upcoming conference before extending the digital enhancements across their entire experience.

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Build.

Now it was time to build something functional, stylish, and lasting.

The solution we developed included a site that we would build and roll-out immediately. We stayed nimble and guided MPC through the process of setting priorities to bring more functionality online in phase two. Building out the ‘find a broker’ page was paramount, as this public facing tool is used by thousands of Canadians searching for a mortgage broker. The new experience also required a language option which their old site had never been able to accommodate. We worked on widgets that needed to be completely rebuilt, and optimized and those that could simply be redesigned. And, a big win came by allowing users to login and enjoy a personalized experience that serves up profile details from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. To round out the list improvements, we set up an extension of their existing site so MPC could internally manage registration and take payments for their conference.

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Primary image of the broker search overlayed on a collage of other pages from the design work.

Engage.

No renovation is complete until it’s filled with people who love the new space.

“The team at Flywheel kept us on track, they challenged us in a good way, and listened to understand what it was we wanted to achieve.” That’s what we heard from the client. And the feedback from users has been extremely positive. The Find Me A Broker has been a huge hit, with the analytics showing tremendous engagement and user satisfaction. Internally, the autonomy given to the team at MPC who manage their national conference has provided tremendous efficiency: “This was the first time we were able to manage this part of our conference internally and we were so impressed. Our staff loved it.”

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