Edgar Allan gave Balentine the full brand to build treatment.
Our team turned Balentine's new brand position into impactful messaging and created an information-rich, evergreen web experience that speaks to who the brand has become.
Giving new light to legacy
With offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, Balentine is a wealth management firm that helps individuals, families, and institutions manage and grow their money. They’re a tried and true financial management company on the surface, with a challenging, bifurcated audience of corporations and wealthy individuals. But dig deeper (as we did), and you’ll find the Balentine crew are innovators and entrepreneurs themselves with a lot of experience guiding clients through the less publicized challenges of high-net-worth existence, like easing family friction and ensuring a lasting legacy.
Defining a modern look and feel for a classic firm
After years of struggling to update an outdated Wordpress site, Balentine was looking for a brand refresh, a new user experience, and a platform that would allow them to easily make updates to their site. We partnered closely with the firm throughout the process — from working on everything from brand messaging to final build — to create a site that would suit both their needs and those of their users. The firm came to us with a new brand position (propelling legacies), which we flipped into messaging around a legacy of possibility — wording that both reflected the firm’s 35-year history (important for their corporate audience) but also spoke to the ambitions of the young, entrepreneurial individuals that make up much of Balentine’s client base.
Getting our bearings
We began the Balentine project with a site audit — a vital process that we often implement in our migration projects that helps us first understand what’s existing on the site so that we can then start shaping what exactly we’ll build. For this project, the audit was huge, helping us see the full shape of a somewhat complicated site. The audit was also instrumental later on in the build, helping us sort over 400 blog articles across two business lines and successfully migrate all entries from WordPress to Webflow.
Giving clients a clear path
One of our major tasks in re-thinking the Balentine experience was eliminating the site’s original structure: A bifurcated architecture that forced users to enter through the front door (i.e., the home page) and then immediately choose between institutional management and wealth management. This posed a couple of issues. The first was for users, who may not know which of the two buckets they fall into, and the second for Balentine, who found themselves managing two sites that largely mirrored one another. In the redesign, we eliminated the split, intuitively combining all services together while leading corporate investment clients to their corner of the site. We also highlighted the firm’s personal, human-focused brand by giving high priority to content around Balentine’s unique perspective.
Bringing it all together
To further reinforce the firm’s human-centered brand, we organized Balentine’s new homepage around five questions that the team often gets from clients about wealth management. These inquiries each lead to information-rich landing pages designed to put clients at ease and draw prospective clients further into the site with service page links. The best part: We know those questions will change over time, but because of Webflow’s easy to use CMS, Balentine will be able to change them out and deepen the “answer” content, keeping their site evergreen for years to come.
Once UX, copy, and design were complete, we moved Balentine’s new site into Webflow. Development was straightforward, and once the site was finished, we were able to train the Balentine team on the platform so that they can make their own updates to the site, refresh content (like the home question pages), and truly own their site.
