Rob Knights and Co site redesign and update

Rob Knights and Co are an established, niche B2B service delivering carefully crafted Australian financial and legal business benchmarking data. They needed a new site that reflected the full breadth of their products in a way that clearly stated the solutions their products provided for individual clients and for the industries they serve and to modernise the look, feel and user experience.

The old site, built on a confusing CRM, was not only cluttered (making it difficult to understand the business focus), it was not responsive and its software (PHP version) was perilously out of date and unable to be updated. We migrated content to WordPress and used Beaver Builder and themer to deliver a site that will be easy for self-management ongoing, and incorporates a variety of eCommerce solutions within the framework.

What Rob Knights and Co do [well]

Michelle Knights personally gathers, collates and fiercely protects the essential data that is their stock in trade. Tireless and with impeccable attention to detail, building a new website for the business was less a priority than delivering their invaluable benchmarking reports and engaging personally with their client base. Immensely busy and focused on strong data and customer care, the 2020 enforced events and travel hiatus allowed her to carve out time to prepare the information she needed for the new site and I’m immensely grateful to her for trusting Love Communications to build this for her.

Rebuilding from navigation up

We restructured the navigation into service bases and built from there. The previous navigation talked in generalities: services, news, blog, while the new navigation sells the services clearly. Customers needing benchmarking data to help gauge their own performance and management know immediately they are in the right place for support, and can purchase the reports that will give them that information.

Keeping up momentum

The challenge for us was keeping momentum in the project while the client was immensely busy doing the business of business. We agreed a new design and navigation early in the process, keeping it updated and ready for content and products until the client was able to devote the time needed to provide service and product information. From start to finish was more than 2 years, but the process could not have been performed more quickly. The client simply did not have the time to make time for it, so we held the project open, preparing what we could from the site in place and from meetings scheduled where possible.

Automation

The products we built for Rob Knights have introduced efficiencies into the practice – purchases can be made online for clients who want to work that way, while still allowing the tried and tested personal conversation and ‘faxed through’ orders, for those clients who don’t care greatly for change. The process of thinking how the company could modernise what has to remain a very manual process (receiving data, collating data and ensuring hospital-grade data cleanliness) was valuable for all involved. The automations have provided efficiencies, while allowing them to be still very hands on. We supported this gentle journey into automation by building out complex conditional ecommerce products that allowed for purchases with multiple parameters, delivering clearly defined instructions for delivery.

Quiet and focused perfection

The build duration was not ideal, but we understood from the outset that working with Michelle would not be like working with anyone else in business. She has the most focused and determined approach to customer service I’ve encountered, and this, above all else, is what keeps her in business. Her quiet gathering of information, her ability to understand business and people and see trends and movements that have played out over more than 30 years collating financial services business data has made her a titan in her field. She doesn’t hurry, but when she is open to engagement, she is completely and fully engaged with a clarity of purpose that was a privilege to work alongside.