Automated Financial Systems launched a new afsvision.com with clickable graphics
The Customer
Automated Financial Systems (AFS) makes commercial lending software for banks. Their marketing team came to Lynton in December 2022 with a clear brief. They wanted a fresher, more modern afsvision.com, and they knew what modern looked like to them. They pointed to their partner nCino and to Accenture as sites with the feel they were after, and they put together a slide deck of what they liked and disliked about their own site and others.
The Challenge
AFS wanted a site a visitor could interact with. That meant interactive graphics a visitor could click through, the option of a video behind the homepage hero, and a resources area for press releases and webinars.
The build was to be on the HubSpot Starter Theme with a handful of custom modules on top, so each custom piece had to count.
The AFS team reviews designs carefully, and their CEO reviewed the homepage himself. The design process had to accommodate that without stalling.
The Solution
We designed the homepage first and took it through three rounds of client revisions. Round two offered two directions, a blue overlay on a full-width image or video versus a solid blue hero, and AFS chose the overlay. For round three, their marketing team sent their own rearranged mock-up with the CEO’s notes, and we worked that layout into the design: bigger and bolder stats under the header, a featured-content row, the client quote moved up, and a careers spotlight further down. The approved design also included a mega menu, a sticky header and mobile layouts.
From that approved homepage we built seven templates on the Starter Theme: Home, About, Contact, a Flexible Inner page, Blog Listing, Blog Detail, and a Resources listing driven by HubDB.
The custom modules carry the site. The hero takes a video or an image in the background, the decorative patterns can be switched on or off, and the angled background accents take whatever color the editor picks. The interactive graphic is a circle divided into up to eight clickable sections, each one swapping the content beside it. A horizontal tabbed version does the same with swappable icons on its buttons. Around those sit a featured events slider, a logo slider, an image gallery, a collapsible two-column module that doubles as a job listing, and a yellow accent bar with every heading.
The leadership page uses a staff module with pop-out bios. Clicking a person opens their bio and social links in place, modeled on the nCino leadership page AFS admired, so no separate bio pages are needed.
The blog and resources listings have filters and search that an editor can show or hide. We checked every template across browsers at several desktop widths and on mobile, ran two rounds of user acceptance testing, trained the AFS team in a one-hour session, defined the redirects from the old site, set up Google Analytics, Tag Manager and Search Console, and launched on May 15, 2023.
What They Got
AFS now has a site their own team runs. They publish new pages themselves, choose the hero media per page, and decide on each page whether the patterns and accents appear. Anything with up to eight parts can be shown as a clickable graphic. Leadership bios live in one module. Press releases and webinars go into a resources library with search and filters, and blog posts into a listing of their own.
The site went live five months after kickoff, with the interactive graphics and pop-out bios AFS asked for at the start.
Wrapping Up
The standard on this job was to give an exacting marketing team the modules they asked for on a standard theme, and to let them keep editing without a developer. Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.