Case Study:Edward Jones - edwardjones.com

Owning the Front-End for Marketing Campaign Pages

Enhancing edwardjones.com as a Lead Generation Channel

As a member of the Edward Jones Digital Marketing team, I developed and maintained all marketing campaign pages on the firm's primary lead generation channel, edwardjones.com, including landing pages and microsites for paid search and social media campaigns, as well as ongoing themed sections of the site that fell outside of standard page templates.

Driving Impact

In this role, I also partnered with the Content Management System (CMS) implementation team to identify and coordinate performance and accesibility optimizations, including initiating a move from HTTP to HTTPS, mitigating critical request chains for CSS and JavaScript files, improving Core Web Vitals, and ensuring compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

Redesigning edwardjones.com and Migrating to a New CMS

The Opportunity Space

In 2019, the need for an updated public web presence coupled with an expiring CMS license prompted the Edward Jones Marketing department to launch an effort to replace the firm's primary lead generation mechanism, edwardjones.com, and the SDL Tridion CMS on which it was built. While responsible day-to-day for developing all marketing campaign pages and non-templated front-end code for the website, I also served as the front-end and design consultant for a rigorous and months-long Request For Proposal (RFP) process to identify a new CMS, as well as a partner agency to run point on implementing a redesigned experience in the new CMS.

Guiding the Redesign of edwardjones.com

I partnered with UX Researchers and fellow Edward Jones designers, along with designers from implementation agency, Publicis Sapient, to redesign the web experience, and advised on individual component architecture, site-wide information architecture, and integrating new and emergent Edward Jones Brand standards.

Additionally, I ensured that the redesign effort incorporated guidance on design patterns and WCAG acessibility best practices from the firm's enterprise design system, AXIOM.

This project needed to balance and satisfy requirements from a multitude of stakeholders, from Marketing, to Legal and Compliance, to those representing the firm's 19,000 Financial Advisors and their branch support teams.

Driving Impact

Features included a robust home page, profile page templates for 19,000 financial advisors, and a locator tool to search for an advisor by name or location. The ultimate launch was enthusiastically received by stakeholders, company leadership, and the Financial Advisor community.

Refining the Front-End and Designing New Experiences

Following the 2021 relaunch of edwardjones.com, I moved into a Front-End and UX Design consultant role on the site. In this role, I shepherded UX and product design work from agency designers and mentored junior offshore developers. I advised on HTML, CSS and JavaScript best practices and on integrating browser APIs and third party libraries (e.g. container queries for component layout, and HighCharts for data visualizations). Occasionally, I stepped in to provide solutions for achieving design and accessibility requirements by means of functional in-browser prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

In addition, I designed new user experiences for edwardjones.com, including a new Privacy and Security Center and an entire flow for the site's educational webinar series, from browsing and registration to an integration with the On24 webinar platform.