Vertex Inc.

Website Strategy
and Optimization

A laptop with the Vertex homepage displayed, sitting on a table.

Vertex is the leader in tax automation technology, providing a suite of software solutions for global enterprise businesses. I worked closely across the marketing department within Vertex and my team at O3 World to redesign their customer-facing marketing website, introduce new solutions to meet their business goals, and continually optimize the experience for prospective customers.

An Evolving Design System

As the Design Director working with Vertex, I came in to provide oversight and design and strategy leadership for their website. While O3 World had worked with Vertex for several years across many products and marketing initiatives, I joined the team midway through a major rebranding of the entire organization. Over the months that followed, we worked closely with the Vertex team to evolve and apply a cohesive design system across their website and products, and implement new systems for ongoing work on the website.

A laptop and smartphone displaying the Vertex Solutions pages and contact form.
As part of our ongoing work with Vertex, we led the redesign of the Solutions section of the website, guiding their team through reimagined content and design for more targeted lead generation.
A screenshot of the Vertex Inc design system, depicting various card styles.
Our design system and component library for Vertex is both a source of truth and highly iterative as the brand continued to evolve and new features, functionality, and patterns were added to the system.

Explore the System

Vertex's design system is regularly updated and made available online.

Focused on Business Objectives

As both a website development and strategic partner, we worked closely with Vertex to align our website objectives to their Enterprise and Marketing objectives. In 2019, we implemented a quarterly website review process, where we conducted a thorough evaluation and reporting on the work completed over the last period to their leadership team. As part of this process, we worked to understand changing priorities of the organization and bring our insight to the table to guide their priorities. To support this work, each project or initiative for the website needed to align to the company's objectives and have clearly defined key results for measurement.

A screenshot from a recent quarterly website review presentation depicting heatmaps from site performance.
As part of our quarterly website reviews, we demonstrated work completed over the past quarter and analyzed, where possible, analytics to derive insight related to completed projects. We also shared recommendations for future quarters for the leadership team to consider.

Ongoing Optimization

After the initial relaunch of the website after the brand overhaul, we focused on an iterative rollout of new features and redesigned sections of the site, including–but not limited to—a revamp of the Resources section to allow for easier searching and navigation, an overhaul of the Partners section, and redesign campaign pages to support new paid campaign efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also worked with international partners to design and implement localized parts of the site for their international customers.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, like many businesses, Vertex needed to explore new approaches to their marketing. We created a new system for building campaign landing pages for their paid efforts, designed across breakpoints with device specific optimizations to create an appropriate experience per platform. This new system was design, tested, and launched within two weeks.

As part of our ongoing work with Vertex, we regularly conducted evaluative and ethnographic research with customers and prospects, and regularly validated our approach through user testing and A/B or multivariate testing. This regular feedback also fueled our pipeline for future recommendations for optimizations to both their marketing efforts and products.