Hillier Hopkins

Re-Design, Build, and Migration to a new WordPress platform.

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The Brief

Hillier Hopkins LLP is a leading Chartered Accountants & Tax Adviser in London, Watford, and Milton Keynes with clients including individuals and businesses ranging from small family enterprises to large international companies.

Hillier Hopkins approached SOtech because their existing website was in desperate need of a design uplift, but also because their incumbent platform was going to end of life.

The brief to SOtech was simple, using Hillier Hopkins branding to design a brand new website with a focus on communicating to their key audiences in a modern way.

The solution

Before we started any design work, we decided that a key element to this project was ensuring we understood the key user profiles who would be using the website. We, therefore, held 2 sessions with the key stakeholders in the business where we covered our trademark ‘Discover and Strategy’ process.

3-5 year business goals
Key user journey analysis
Existing site analytics review
SWOT analysis
Competitor analysis
Another industry review of likes/dislikes

After these sessions, we then agreed on an aesthetic route and what the key components of the new site would be.

Repeatable use of imagery and graphics

Because Hiller Hopkins doesn’t have in-house graphics capabilities, a key component of the project was to ensure that whatever we designed and launched would be easy to maintain and repeat. The solution for this was using custom CSS overlays meaning whatever images and graphics were uploaded the same style and look would be achieved – giving a consistent aesthetic.

Managing and linking content

So much of what Hiller Hopkins provides to its customers online is up-to-date content about changes in legislation, rules, and calendar-related information.

In order for this to be easy to find and navigate we needed a way to link this content across different areas of the site – not to just sit within a blog.

Using custom code and multiple levels of tagging we were able to show the same piece of content in 3 key areas of the site:

Insights
Sector-specific pages
Experts

Cross Referencing Different Sectors

Many Hiller Hopkins users visit the site without knowing the exact service or sector they need, therefore by introducing tags to sector page post types and linking different pages within the admin we were able to show alternative pages meaning users are able to continue reading content without hitting dead ends.

FAQs

Given the service proposition Hillier Hopkins offer, FAQs are more important than most. Not only did we need to create a dedicated hub for FAQs we also needed to again link specific FAQs to relevant sector pages.

Using our custom code we again made it possible to post an FAQ and choose which service pages were relevant to display this content where it is most needed.

The Results

Unanimously well received by the entire Hillier Hopkins team, they were delighted with the new website. Since going live in 2021 we have continued to work together to add new features and functions to further increase their ability to service their customer base.