A website that saves time
Impact Hub Hamburg spent much time explaining their offerings to companies and individuals. They had already lost business because people didn’t know how to book a co-working slot or membership.
Their new website communicates their offers and answers common questions—helping them save time.
We need our own website!
Impact Hub Hamburg is a local community and co-working space within the global Impact Hub Network and partnering with the local non-profit 105 VIERTEL.
When we first spoke, Impact Hub Hamburg did not have their own website—just a one-pager on the 105 VIERTEL website, a linktree, and different social profiles. They were lacking opportunity to
- showcase their brand
- communicate their diverse offering
- answer pre-sales questions and explain their membership tool
That way, the staff spent a lot of time answering the same questions and explaining benefits to new prospects individually.
With their new website, they can:
Let’s talk about your website needs!
How can we communicate our offerings to our different target groups?
Impact Hub Hamburg’s mission is to connect individuals from the impact scene with established companies as “partners in change” for a positive future. We needed to find a way to communicate the different offerings to the two target groups:
- community memberships and co-working packages for individuals
- corporate memberships and consulting services for corporates
How I achieved this:
The primary navigation is split into “offers for corporates” and “offers for the community”. Each section lists offers below. Offers for both target groups appear in both locations. This way, visitors can identify with one target group and find all relevant offers there.
The homepage hero section explains that mission and supports it visually by the puzzle metaphor. It then links to the respective sections for individuals from the community and corporations where they can learn more about the different offers.
On the sub-pages for the different target groups we made sure to show social proof from that target group: The corporate pages feature testimonials from locally known organizations, while the community pages give voice to real community members.
Creating a visual style that’s professional, sustainable and inclusive
Impact Hub Hamburg had the chance to work with a WordPress template owned by the Impact Hub Network, which had two disadvantages:
- My clients disliked the bubbly and colorful style and suspected that it would not do well representing their professionalism for consulting services towards corporates.
- The template with huge images, videos, and animations has abysmal performance ( > 16 seconds to load the homepage impacthub.net). We also spotted accessibility problems (like low contrast issues) inherent in the visual design system. This was not acceptable in terms of my client’s commitment to sustainability and inclusion.
Still, there was the mandate to work from Impact Hub’s global brand guidelines.
Here’s how I united these seemingly conflicting directions: The new website uses mostly design elements from the global brand guidelines such as logos, fonts, and authentic photography of diverse people. It sticks to the brand principles, values and tone of voice.
With a few distinct changes, I was able to achieve my client’s goals:
Images come without the bubbly shapes. Their size and placement is optimized to still feature them as the main point of visual interest but at the same time not harm performance.
As an accent color, we’re using the Deep Blue shade from the brand guidelines which communicates professionalism and provides sufficient contrast. We do not use the other accent colors orange, green and light blue that lead to contrast issues.
Since the brand guidelines did not take into account dark mode, I created a dark theme from the brand colors. It uses shades of Deep Blue as primary color and adds shades of teal as accents.
Improving performance, accessibility, and SEO
Before
The previous one-page site was built on Wix. The performance rating was horrible, while accessibility and SEO scores were good.
However, a look under the hood revealed many accessibility errors that an automated tool cannot pick up.
Plus, the one page site limited the chance to rank for multiple relevant keywords.
After
The new site loads on a mobile device in under 3 seconds (0.9 on desktop) and is easily accessible:
- the modern, lightweight, responsive theme comes with performant code
- images are now fully optimized and served in the right size
- the site is accessible throughout
Additionally, we optimized different sub-pages for services and target groups for relevant SEO keywords.
Reducing CO2 emissions by 82%
The mission of Impact Hub Hamburg is “Building bridges for a regenerative future”. Naturally, they care about sustainability and want others to do the same.
Although large images are still the main visual element, I managed to reduce the homepage’s carbon emissions by 82% compared to their previous one-page Wix website by
- optimizing image formats, sizes and compressions
- using highly efficient code in the background.
We are pleased that this image-heavy site still makes the top 7% of all websites analyzed.*
This helps Impact Hub Hamburg to showcase their commitments to sustainability and to raise awareness on the topic of internet emissions.
* All data based on analyses with Website Carbon.
Before
Emissions per view
After
Emissions per view
How my websites help your impact business grow
Reach
more clients
By making your website accessible, I ensure that anybody can get in touch with you.
Improve
SEO rankings
With sustainable design practices, I will improve usability, loading times, and SEO rankings.
Increase
your impact
Use your valuable time to focus on the parts of your business that you love.
You want to spend more time on your business?
I’ll create a website that does the heavy lifting for your marketing and sales.
I’m happy to discuss a strategy for your website in a no-pressure 30-minute strategy call where you can
- talk about your website goals,
- get free strategy advice,
- get a pricing quote.
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