Lean Tree — Website Redesign

Standing out in a crowded marketplace is a challenge we know about all too well! Sometimes the best way to stand out is to be bold.

Tim and his team at Lean Tree reached out to us back in January. Their website, which was built with Elementor, had been having some issues with downtime and was slightly too slow. After being recommended to reach out to us at Tiny Blue Rocket, I worked with him to initially fix the problems on their site.

With new hosting as a first priority, we immediately fixed the issues with website downtime. Then, we set to work on changes to caching, how the website loaded the CSS and Javascript code and reducing WordPress plugins. Finally, we looked at the on-page design. After all of this, the Lean Tree website significantly improved.

One issue remained, the design still tended to slow down the website. With an image slider at the top, it caused visible shifts in the content as it loaded and caused a slowdown. The only solution was eventually to undertake a redesign.

Scaled Agile Training & Coaching

Throughout my time working with businesses to build their websites I have come across so many different types of businesses. From beauty salons to holiday homes. Accountants to glazers, all providing a rich array of businesses and sectors.

Lean Tree is a unique business for us. At its heart, Lean Tree aims to help businesses “with complex delivery and business transformation challenges”. Essentially, they help advise businesses to deal with challenges as they grow and develop. Their input enables businesses and their employees to be working to best practice.

They provide a wide variety of services to businesses. They have recently launched their Employed Consultant Model. This service aims to help businesses with IR35 compliance issues. An issue that I myself are trying to understand and see how it will affect the way I have worked and will work in a white-label capacity.

Lean Tree also provides a range of coaching and consultancy opportunities. They have skilled professionals on hand to provide support for growing businesses.

As well as consultancy, Lean Tree provides high-quality course and training. Currently online-only, they offer SAFe training and certification to empower people and organisation to work to a scaled agile framework.

Visually appealing and faster-loading

I’m yet to decide whether a redesign or building a first website for a new business is easier. Both provide immense challenges!

The two main pillars of the redesign were to make the website visually more appealing and more modern whilst also improving speed.

Lean Tree has a clear brand identity. With two bold, striking colours paired with a soft grey in their logo, it was important to keep the colour palette simple and on-brand. Font choices also came down to what works well with the current branding and provides the right image of professionalism.

One thing that made the redesign somewhat more straightforward was that Tim and his team looked at our website and commented that it was ideal. While there are substantial differences in layout, the main design and flow of their website were similar to the Tiny Blue Rocket website.

Reduce workload with custom post types

While the initial discussions were mostly about visual, front-end improvements to the website, I was aware from working on their website that the backend could also be streamlined.

By adding team members to the About page, lists of consultants available to hire and reviews on every page, there was a lot of content that would be tricky to have to manually edit on multiple pages.

By using the JetEngine plugin, I was able to create multiple custom post types. What that means is that Tim and his team only need to make minor tweaks from the WordPress dashboard once and the changes are reflected on multiple pages.

The ‘Review’ custom post type allows the Lean Tree team to easily add new customer reviews. They simply have to copy over content from Trustpilot and that new review is instantly available on almost every page of the website. A matter of seconds to add rather than many minutes to edit every page.

I always make it my mission to make it ridiculously easy for business owners to edit and maintain their website.

In summary

Take some time today to check out the redesigned Lean Tree website. With a leaner, more modern design, it’s a great example of what we can do to help businesses get their perfect website!

If you are looking to launch a new business or give an existing one a makeover, please do reach out to us at Tiny Blue Rocket.