DBS Aligns Brand and Vision with Blue Sentry Analytics Website Project

Blue Sentry Analytics, formerly Blue Sentry Cloud, knew where they wanted to go. They came to DBS Interactive to help them get there.

The company specializes in cloud data solutions for Fortune 100 enterprises in highly regulated financial services, insurance, and healthcare industries.

As they've become known today, BSC Analytics needed more than a new website. They needed a new branding song with a strong digital foundation because their expertise and services expanded beyond cloud platform engineering into digital analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

This article goes behind the scenes, breaking down the intensive strategic planning, design, and development of the brand and building a high-performance website that would be a testament to its technical services.

Objectives Connect Vision with Action

Just as BSC approaches client projects, understanding the clear goals and defining results, they came to us with the vision to refresh the brand, build a website that reinforces its new identity, appeal to Fortune 100 companies, and simplify publishing engineering expertise.

Refocusing Services, Refreshing the Brand

Blue Sentry saw a shift in the cloud services sector, where commoditization made technical solutions less of a differentiator. 

Businesses needed more than cloud infrastructure. They needed to leverage massive amounts of big data to drive growth and outmaneuver their competitors for a competitive edge.

BSC pivoted.

The company needed to reflect that change through its name and branding materials without abandoning its technical foundation, thus alienating existing clients.

Telling the BSC Analytics Story

The new website had to convey this message while staying rooted in its strong technical foundation to appeal to C-suite executives, IT leaders, and data professionals.

This wouldn't be a simple shift.

It would require a careful balancing act to show that Blue Sentry remained rooted in the past, which took its clients where they are today, while today offering more to get them to new levels of success.

Building a Website That Works as Hard as BSC

The BSC website couldn't just talk about best practices. The company's new website had to embody them. It needed to be fast, technically sound, and built to industry-leading standards.

Simply, it needed to mirror what it offers BSC clients – high-performance, secure, and scalable solutions.

More than a static website or digital brochure, the new platform had to provide its audiences with current, high-quality, technical information while serving as an intuitive and efficient tool for BSC's technical professionals, not digital marketers.

Defining Risks, Identifying Opportunities

Before entering the critical strategy phase, we identified hurdles and risks. Addressing challenges upfront established clear expectations, helped define strategies, and kept the project on track.

This proactive approach minimizes risks, helping ensure the website and brand evolve and resonate with current clients and prospects, benefiting everyone involved.

Maximize Budget, Prevent Scope Creep

Unplanned additions or changes can exceed the defined scope, leading to delays and added costs. We would identify features and functions for the client to consider.  
Miscommunication of Blue Sentry's expanded capabilities could confuse customers and diminish the strength of the original brand, ultimately eroding trust and loyalty.

Don't Alienate Existing Clients

If the shift to a new identity isn't carefully managed, it risks alienating loyal clients who might feel disconnected from the company's original value proposition.

Fix an Underperforming User Experience

Without clear communication of new and old services, users could be frustrated by a confusing or unengaging website, leading to a poor user experience, underperforming organic search, and lost conversion opportunities.

Help Visitors Understand 'The Engagement Model'

Failing to effectively present the client's unique "open scope" project model as its differentiating value proposition could result in missed opportunities. Prospects might not understand BSC's flexibility, leading them to choose a competitor.

Embody the Brand's Elevated Reputation

A poorly executed repositioning strategy, including weak messaging or a subpar website, would risk damaging BSC's brand equity, which could lead to a loss of market credibility.

Aligning Every Step with Objectives

We conducted collaborative strategy sessions with every detail in mind, from defining the brand identity and voice to creating detailed personas and user stories.

We then carefully constructed the website's navigation and content pathways to meet immediate goals and long-term objectives, ensuring an engaging experience for every visitor.

We Hear You

Stakeholder interviews helped us capture the facts and the authentic voice of Blue Sentry's leadership, ensuring their values were reflected throughout the site. 

We focused on themes of credibility, highlighting technical qualifications, certifications, and past successes.

The tone blends professionalism with approachability, reflecting the company's core values of integrity, collaboration, and results. This balance fosters trust with key audiences, from senior executives to job prospects. We also highlighted BSC's culture of collaboration, thought leadership, and practical problem-solving culture, reinforcing their industry leadership and strong ethical standards.

We emphasized the company's collaborative culture, expertise, and practical problem-solving, reinforcing its industry leadership and ethical standards.

These insights shaped the site's structure and content flow, aligning with business goals and creating a user experience that inspires trust and engagement.

Unlocking Needs and Wants of Primary Website Stakeholders

Understanding the audience informs all of the steps during strategic planning.
We started by identifying unique stakeholders who may explore the website and lead to discussions with Blue Sentry.

Through stakeholder interviews and collaboration, we defined seven key personas—ranging from senior executives to engineers and job prospects—each with distinct goals. 

While most of the personas may have overlapping reasons for browsing the BSC website, we focused on the target audience's unique needs, motivations, and challenges. 

Addressing the needs of each stakeholder ensured the website's content and functionality aligned with the diverse audience's individual expectations, pain points, and intentions. 
Each persona seeks specific details, such as certifications, technical qualifications, company culture, and past successes, to validate BSC Analytics as a credible choice within their industry.

• Sr. VP - Banking and Finance
• C-Suite
• Investment banker
• Job prospect
• Analyst or reporter
• Tech partner engineer
• Internal content manager

User Stories Turn Insights Into Actions

We took an agnostic approach to user stories, knowing they shouldn't be confined to project scope. We dug deeper to uncover opportunities that could impact BSC Analytics' broader digital strategy. We wanted to empower them with insights for smarter, long-term decisions.

A detailed approach to pinpointing messaging opportunities, calls to action, and content pathways, ensuring the website delivers relevant, targeted information to every visitor. This allowed us to craft a site that meets immediate goals and adapts to future needs.

The personas identified stakeholders as bottom-line-focused, seeking ways to grow financially or intellectually.

The user stories also projected potential pathways a user might take to fulfill their need and the likely acceptance criteria. These might be clicks, landing on a specific page, downloading a document, submitting a contact form, etc.

Keeping Navigation, User Flows, and Wire Frames Simple

We used insights from the personas, user stories, and branding to build a streamlined site map, user flow maps, and wireframes. We aimed to create a simple, intuitive experience requiring the fewest clicks, guiding users quickly to their objectives.

The site map provided an organized structure, ensuring that each persona's needs were met with minimal navigation. We designed user flows to ensure visitors could move seamlessly from one task to the next, whether verifying expertise, exploring careers, or evaluating investments.

The site map focused solely on primary navigation to streamline the user experience, catering to the time-starved, bottom-line-focused personas. 

By eliminating offering fewer choices and addressing key interests like expertise validation, actionable insights, and business growth, we ensured users could quickly access the most relevant content without feeling overwhelmed by choices.

Wireframes introduced these flows, featuring clear calls to action and intuitive paths that reduced friction. Focusing on user needs and BSC's brand, we crafted a website that maximized engagement, boosted conversions, and reinforced BSC Analytics' authority.

Design Comes to Life

Defining BSC Analytics' voice, branding, and audience needs comes to life in the design process. While seeing how the earlier steps would manifest in style was often challenging, tiles and mockups made everything tangible. 

The style tiles maintained BSC's original brand colors, honoring the company's heritage while refreshing the visual identity to feel current and dynamic. 

Mockups brought everything together, showcasing how the clean, focused structure and messaging would evolve into an energetic website. 

The design reflected BSC Analytics' forward-thinking approach, incorporating subtle animation features to engage users and add a modern touch. The final mockups illustrated a site that respected the past but embraced the future, creating a user-centered experience that would drive results for Blue Sentry.

A CMS of Similar Mind

We chose Statamic for BSC Analytics, aligning it with the client's technical and operational needs. Its flat-file architecture—free from traditional databases—offers speed, simplicity, and cost efficiency. 

This CMS offers easy version control and CI/CD integration, supporting seamless deployments without database migration headaches.

Statamic suits the tech-focused team inside BSC Analytics. Many are familiar with Markdown, which Statamic uses for content storage. 

Statamic allows the BSC engineers to manage their content production without accessing the CMS interface, streamlining workflows and boosting productivity, letting the team focus on primary responsibilities.

Security is baked into everything at Blue Sentry. Its digital presence is no exception.

The Statamic CMS aligns with the company's security-centric mindset. The file-based architecture eliminates the need for a traditional database, which is often a target for hackers. This structure significantly reduces the website's attack surface, minimizing the risk of data breaches. 

Additionally, Statamic incorporates advanced security features such as encryption protocols and access control mechanisms, ensuring that any sensitive data remains protected, reinforcing the brand's commitment to security.

The site also integrates Salesforce for customer management and Pinpoint for careers, making it a versatile platform for growing businesses.

Launched and Ready for What Comes Next

The BSC Analytics website drives the company's growth strategy. It is designed to reflect the brand's core values and is built for performance today and tomorrow. 

Engineered with industry best practices, it is future-proof, ready to seize opportunities, and maintain a competitive edge. Optimized for long-term performance, it will consistently deliver exceptional user experiences as new features and content are added.

 With focused strategies in place—content creation, cross-channel promotion, and continual optimization—the website will strengthen BSC's visibility, engagement, and growth. It sets the foundation for the future, empowering the company to expand its reach, attract new audiences, and solidify its position as a thought leader.