In 2022, the Executive Leadership Team at Fortis Life Sciences decided that the company needed a new website, complete with a visual brand refresh and updated market positioning. I was selected to be the marketing lead for this project and was joined by a co-lead from our technology team. The new website launched in February 2025.
Improving the User Experience
The main problem with our old website was a perceived difficulty for customers to navigate through our megamenu to find key landing pages for our product and service offerings.
Understanding the customer journey
A key component of our work was to refine the ideal customer profile (ICP) and customer journeys for Fortis. Though our old website targeted “Researchers,” “Diagnostic Manufacturers,” and “Biopharma Customers,” we knew that those identities were not entirely distinct from each other (more below). In partnership with an external agency, we identified the ICP for each product and service for each of the seven brands under the Fortis holding company. In each profile, we defined elements such as:
- Company size
- Company industry
- Research area
- Buyer persona
- Influencer persona
- Budgets
- Team size
- Motivating factors
- Company and team goals
- Timelines
- Additional product/service needs
- Key industry publications and tradeshows
Aligning seven portfolio companies
After developing customer profiles across all seven brands, the challenge became consolidating the details into one unified website that would not overwhelm or confuse prospective customers.
In evaluating competitor websites, we realized that no other companies in the life sciences tools industry were segmenting their customers by industry type in the megamenu. Instead, they were grouping their products and services by deliverable.
A data-driven approach
We also took a complementary data-driven approach to understand the challenges that customers were having in navigating our website, looking at metrics including:
- Entries and exits to key landing pages
- Time spent on key landing pages
- Pages navigated to after the homepage
- Use of the megamenu vs search
- Site search terms with zero results
- Number of pages per session
- Sessions with key events/conversions
Before and after
Using user behavior data from our own website along with research of competitor websites, we redesigned the megamenu navigation to our products and services to better reflect industry standard. Use the slider to see before and after!
Updating our Brand Identity
The old Fortis brand identity was very heavy, led primarily by a medium purple and with the primary design element being dark purple letterforms.
As part of this project, we developed a new brand palette, maintaining the shade of medium purple that has become associated with our brand but incorporating a lighter shade of purple and a gray as accent colors as well as additional muted/pastel shades of blue, green, and orange as secondary and tertiary colors. Furthermore, instead of the letterforms, we designed a helix motif as our key brand element.
Modernizing our Tech Stack
From a technology standpoint, this project was the opportunity to modernize some aspects of our tech stack, namely the transition to:
- builder.io, a visual/no-code editor
- Secure Privacy, for cookie consent
We currently use the following tools to measure performance on our website:
- Google Analytics, to track page visits and key events
- Google Tag Manager, to pass site data to Google Analytics, LinkedIn, etc.
- Hotjar, to understand individual user & session behavior
Current Challenges and Solutions
The primary challenge is how to measure the impact of redesigning the website and brand identity. Namely, this is because the new website implemented opt-in cookie consent whereas our old site used an opt-out method. Opt-in consent is GDPR-compliant, so this was a requirement to implement. However, it has led to a decrease in tracked visits to our website, making it extremely challenging to understand how user and session metrics have changed since turning on the new site.
Instead of using session numbers and page visits to compare the impact of updating our company website, I have taken the approach of comparing conversions on key landing pages on the old and new websites. Because conversions result in form fills (services) or e-commerce transactions (products), these metrics are not impacted by cookie consent and also give a direct view to the bottom of the website funnel.