Hostwinds
I led the creative team at Hostwinds through a re-launch of their flagship hosting products. This project included art direction, web design, advertising, ecommerce, and apparel design.
In The Beginning
I joined Hostwinds as their first designer in 2019, a small-ish company of around 40 people at the time. The office also doubled at the call center, where we all piled in shoulder-to-shoulder. The brand was undeveloped, and vague at the time. The website was dated and left a lot of room for improvement. As a webhosting business your website is the front-line of your customer base. A strong website really could mean the difference your bottom line.
Hostwinds website circa 2016
Our Customers
Before undertaking a massive re-brand I wanted to understand who our customers were. What were our most used products? Key demographics? What did our users consider our most important feature? Additionally, what did we want our brand to convey about us, as a company? This is where I began collecting data. We talked with users, collected surveys, and looked for days on end at our Google Analytics, so we could understand how to build the best brand for OUR users.
Building Our Vision
We took all the information that we gathered and redesigned our website, emphasizing the company values of acessible pricing, white glove service, and state-of-the-art technology ensuring our customers services were future proof. I led all design work, created the graphics, collaborated with Hostwinds back end dev team (read: me and one other guy), and did the vast majority of the front-end coding. This project took us a little over two months from start-to-finis
Hostwinds Full Website
We did a ton of design exploration and finally landed on something fun and quirky,t hat felt a little less dated. During our research we found an almost cult-like following of our Hosting service on some smaller forums that are used for niche digital trading. So when I was creating the final design, I really tried to appeal to our users here.
