Centennial Bank Website Design

www.bankoncb.com

Centennial Bank is based in Lubbock, TX with branches throughout the state of Texas and have been in business since 1934. They wanted a new site design that would appeal to a more variety of customers, while not ignoring their current customers.

The Challenge

Centennial Bank wanted a new site that would not only reflect their ambitious brand but, represent a simple and traditional updated UI as well. There were quite a few important aspects to take into account, when designing the new site and some of these were:

To continue to attract their current customer demographic of an older crowd, rural and family farmers and small business owners
However, moving forward they also wanted to attract more urban and suburban younger professional customers as well as others who were also wanting a financial partner:
- Entrepreneurs
- Investors
They wanted to be able to gain commercial loans and also:
- construction loans
- mortgage loans
They wanted a more user-friendly experience as a whole

The Solution

Working as the lead designer on this design, I really needed to dive deeply into their past designs, meeting notes and their current site to really get a good feel for who they were, where they were coming from and get a feel for the user’s point of view. I also took into account how involved they were with the community and how Centennial Banks describes themselves:

Big on community
Customer Service = Great Relationships

Other things I took into account were the demographics of that area for example:

Who the people in the area are and what do they do for a living?
What were their age ranges?
What are the distinguishing characteristics of the areas that they serve and are there any landmarks?

The New Design

Taking all the research that I was provided and to include the research I also did; I was able to design a series of very lo-fi wireframes to help plan out the designs moving forward. Plus, I wanted to take care to make sure to address the pain points they had and make the site much more user friendly.

One really nice thing with Centennial Bank was that they really wanted to use their own images as much as possible especially on the Homepage and then on as many downstream pages as possible where it made sense. Because of the relationship, they had with many of their customers and staff we were ablate add a more personal touch to the design. A couple of the other things that were added were:

I was really able to play off the marks in the logo within the hero image (as well as downstream product pages) and the pattern on the homepage
Besides giving us a lot of their own images, they also had a strong style guide I was able to work from

Conclusion

I spent a lot of time with our developer team making sure that the pattern on the homepage looked nice and was shown correctly. The diagonal lines in this pattern proved challenging when aligning edge to edge to make the continuous pattern work in the code. But, we were really able to pull together as a team on this and in the end, it worked out great.

As with any site, there are always needed changes whether that is things we see in the Design QA or changes that come back from the client like for instance:

Down stream image changes
Turning the hero banner into a image change every few seconds or refresh
Copy changes

The team and I were really able address Centennial Bank’s needs and give them an updated user friendly site that they are proud of.

Copy on website: Victoria Kerr and Chris McGillicuddy
Front End Developer: Ashley Sherwood