WordPress website for workforce solutions
Continued proof that WordPress works for companies of all sizes and industries, we polished System One’s online presence with a custom WP theme and website that works as hard as their staffing solutions.
About System One
Founded almost half a century ago, System One is a diverse staffing organization that serves many industries in the US, UK, and Canada. Their workforce solutions focus on specialized technical skills, including many difficult-to-staff niches, such as large-scale operational expertise, government contractors, nuclear engineers, and more.
With footholds in critical infrastructure, technology, life sciences, government, and other highly specialized verticals, System One relies on its ability to connect these industries with skilled workers.
Increasingly, these connections are made through their website.
Over time, System One’s leadership noticed that the website had become outdated and did not necessarily reflect their industry stature or the evolving structure of their organization. To address this, System One connected with By the Pixel via referral for a website redesign of their existing WordPress site, focusing on re-energizing their brand’s online presence and improving the website’s user experience.
Services
Strategy
Web design
Web development
UI/UX design
Deliverables
Reimagined information architecture
Custom WordPress theme
SEO enhancements
Our website work with System One helps them connect job seekers and employers in highly specialized fields.
Strategic & polished brand identity
Since re-energizing the brand was one of System One’s primary goals during the redesign, it remained a thematic focus throughout our work on the website. We helped them clarify their relationships with multiple sub-brands, present their work more thoroughly, and hone in on the elements of their brand that make them stand out from the competition. The visual result of this work is an attractive, speedy, and well-organized website.
Clear taxonomy & information architecture
Through intensive planning, user experience (UX), and design work, our design team restructured the information architecture on System One’s website to more prominently display “what we do” across verticals and solutions.
This process involved multiple discovery calls with stakeholders and extensive research to achieve a taxonomy and hierarchy that is meaningful to users (and search engines) while also visually appealing and organized. Job seekers and employers now enjoy a clear navigational experience on System One’s modern, well-organized website.
Custom, brand-adherent WordPress theme
Expanding on their discovery and research, our designers created a custom modular “System One” theme within WordPress. The theme is beautiful, modern, usable, and specifically designed to reflect System One’s brand guidelines.
Thanks to our component-based web design, System One’s content managers can now create pages in WordPress that always look and feel “like System One,” no matter the order or configuration of the page-building components. This built-in design system allows them to build robust, interactive webpages while providing guardrails that promote and protect the company’s online brand identity no matter who enters content data into the content management system (CMS).
Designed & built for SEO
As the taxonomy and information architecture took shape, we used the information gleaned from this keyword and UX research to improve the website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Since search engines, like users, favor well-organized websites, they’re more likely to display straightforward and easy-to-use ones at the top of their coveted search results. We used this knowledge to inform aspects of System One’s information architecture in ways that help boost their website’s SEO.
In addition to improved information architecture, we helped System One make other SEO enhancements, such as adding descriptive metadata, internal links, schema, descriptive URLs, accessibility features, and more. These enhancements provide Google and other search engines with even more information about each page of their website and aspect of their business. We also installed the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin to help content managers easily identify SEO issues or improvements that arise as they publish new content.
Developing with WordPress: Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Because System One’s new custom WordPress theme needed an easily extendable interface for content generation into custom components without sacrificing user experience, our development team used the ACF plugin.
From a development perspective, ACF’s support for syncing custom fields across environments streamlines the build. It also boasts an excellent graphical user interface (GUI) in the backend for building the required fieldsets (including relevant validation/constraints) to populate front-end components.
This mature and well-supported plugin allows developers to build a custom content structure behind our components. In turn, users can build and manage custom pages while retaining the design philosophy.
Focus on the front end
While always important, front-end development is an especially critical phase of website development for a company that wants its brand to shine online. With ACF handling System One’s content management/creation on the back end, our development team honed in on building out the entirely custom, user-facing front end.
To accomplish this, they used the `@wordpress/scripts` node package manager (NPM) to bootstrap a Webpack build pipeline. While configuring Webpack is notoriously laborious, this package made it easy to bundle the Javascript and compile the stylesheets to ensure speedy page loads.
Additionally, System One’s website includes many animations; while some were handwritten, our development team employed another NPM package, animate on scroll (AOS), to coordinate animations as users scroll through pages. Thanks to AOS, users can peruse page content free from the interruptions and glitches that once characterized pages with heavy animations.
Team-supporting hosting with WP Engine
BTP chose WP Engine as the dedicated hosting provider for System One’s new website. WP Engine facilitates rapid deployments through our continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Our development team also used WP Engine's out-of-the-box support for a dedicated staging environment.
WP Engine’s dedicated staging environment is one of the many ways our team stays agile during development. Because it simplifies the information exchange between development, design, and quality assurance (QA) teams, we can quickly identify and address QA issues. The transparent communication within the staging environment reduces callbacks, friction, and other miscommunications that commonly plague web development projects.
Ongoing partnership & support
We’re happy to report that our partnership with System One did not end with the website’s deployment. We continue to support their business efforts online through consulting, web development, updates, troubleshooting, and more.
Results
Our website redesign for System One increased organic traffic, improved the user experience, and brought their refreshed brand into the limelight.
