Giving a content library a system

Overview

Role

Product designer. Article template, front page, feature image system, developer brief.

Timeframe

Late 2024 – early 2025

Surface

Insights front page, article template, listing pages, feature image system

Team

Tamara Biljman (content and SEO) — identified the problem, co-ran the audit · HubSnacks (external development)

Result

Conversion rate 0.37% → 0.53%. Page views up 110%.

The real problem

The blog was working. That was the difficulty.

Traffic was healthy, rankings held, new visitors arrived in numbers nobody was unhappy with. The brief put it precisely:

“While our blog is performing well and we internally know what it does, this is not clear to new visitors. We’re happy with all the new visitors we’re getting, but we’d like them to stick around and come back as returning visitors who’ll eventually convert — the faster, the better.”

So the job wasn’t attracting readers. It was that a first-time reader had no way of understanding what they’d landed in, no reason to look at a second article, and no path from reading to anything else.

We had a library. It didn’t look like one.

Seven things wrong

Tamara, who owned content and SEO, was the one who noticed it. She lived in the numbers daily and could see readers arriving and not coming back, without a clear account of why.

So we ran a session to work it out properly, went through the blog page by page against four competitors, and wrote down what we found. Seven problems, and they compound.

It wasn’t branded as anything. The tagline read “Social media best practices for brands and agencies” — accurate, and true of every competitor’s blog. Nothing told a new reader they’d arrived somewhere specific.

The front page had no shape. Grey tags along the top, then the latest posts in a list. A reader who didn’t immediately see what they came for left, and there was no visible route to our resources — which mattered, because the blog is a top-of-funnel surface whose natural next step is becoming a lead.

It looked like a different company. The homepage, feature pages and demo page had all been refreshed. The blog hadn’t. Feature images were sourced rather than designed, often unrelated to the topic, and never branded.

Tags were broken in both directions. One tag showed above each title with no control over which — the CMS picked by tag strength, which also determined the related-articles list underneath. So the weakest part of the system was quietly deciding what readers saw next.

Long articles had no map. Navigation was a list of anchor-linked headings in the intro. Nothing to move with once you were inside a two-thousand-word piece.

Text ran in unbroken slabs. Very few ways to break content without importing media, on pages read mostly on phones.

Nothing was quotable. No way to select a passage and share it — the mechanism competitors were using to turn readers into distribution.

The colour system

The idea that tied the rest together.

Every topic cluster got its own colour. Not decoration — structure. The colour appears in the feature image, behind the table of contents, behind the blockquotes, behind in-article images. An article about analytics looks like the other analytics articles, and looks unlike the scheduling ones.

That does three jobs at once. A returning reader recognises the territory before reading a word. Related articles become visually obvious rather than depending on a tagging system we already knew was unreliable. And it solved a production problem — feature images had been hard to source and inconsistent, so making them templated by cluster meant they could be produced quickly and correctly by anyone.

A visual language doing navigational work is worth more than a visual language doing decorative work, and it costs the same to build.

The article

Rebuilt against a defined structure rather than a set of preferences.

Heading, then a CTA to a relevant resource. Feature image. Intro, then a table of contents sitting on the cluster colour. Body sections where no text block runs long without a branded image, a CTA or a blockquote to break it. A sticky anchor menu on the left for moving within long pieces. A sticky, editable promotion on the right, so the feature being promoted matches what the article is about. Tags moved to the bottom where they belong. Related articles at the end.

And the ending changed. Articles used to finish with “Wrapping Up.” They now finish with “How Sendible can help you [do the thing this article is about]” and a call to action chosen to match — trial, feature page, or demo.

The table of contents and sticky menu were argued for on engagement grounds — a reader who can move around a long article stays in it, and session length feeds back into how the piece performs in search. That’s the rare change that serves the reader and the ranking in the same move.

The front page

The old page offered tags and a list. The new one is built as an entry hall.

Newsletter capture in the header. A prominent lead article with featured pieces beside it — which gave the content team a lever they’d never had, the ability to surface the articles that actually drive trials rather than whatever published most recently. Latest articles below that. Topic clusters with selected features. Lead magnets given real space. A slider for the remaining clusters, and a second subscription point further down.

Listing pages went from seven articles to sixteen. It sounds like a small number and it changes browsing completely — one screen of choice instead of three pages of it.

We looked hard at HubSpot, Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Later while doing this. All four had arrived at broadly this structure, which is usually a signal the structure is right rather than a reason to avoid it.

What happened

Comparing January against the December before it:

Direct traffic conversion rose sharply, social by 46%, organic search by 10% and 28% against the two comparison periods.

The CTA data showed where volume and rate diverged: the broad resources offer drew 37,320 views at 2.1% click-through, while a narrow audit offer converted at 6.2% on 823 views.

The number I'd defend

That 64.9% is a December comparison, and December is the weakest month of the year for B2B content. Part of that lift is the calendar.

Against the same month a year earlier, contacts rose 3.75% and conversion went from 0.50% to 0.53%. That’s the honest figure — modest, and complicated further by page views having more than doubled, which moves the denominator under every rate in the table.

So the number I’d stand behind is the conversion rate improvement, not the contact count.

I’m including the flattering version because it’s what the reporting showed and what the team celebrated at the time. But if someone asks whether this redesign delivered a 65% lift, the answer is no. It delivered a real but single-digit rate improvement on substantially more traffic, and the 65% is seasonality sitting on top of it.

What I'd do next

The CTA data points straight at the next test and we never ran it. The broad offer converted at 2.1% across a large audience; a specific one converted at 6.2% across a small one. Nobody had tried matching offer specificity to article intent at scale — the audit offer on articles whose readers are diagnosing a problem, the resource library on articles being read for orientation.

That’s a simple test with a real ceiling, and it needed the conversion architecture in place first. Which is what this redesign built.