If you are reading this it’s because you know we made some changes to the Flutterwave website. Okay, so we changed the whole thing. We didn’t do it for the sake of it – honestly, it was long overdue. 

We’ll explain why. 

The image you are looking at above this text is our first website. We don’t really want to get into why it didn’t work but we will. 

The colour, the imagery, the complete lack of a human element. It basically looked like what you would expect a website for a company like ours to look like. At the time, anyway. 

We went heavy on the text and explanations but really light on images, illustrations and everything else that made it easier to visualise what we do as a company. The result of this was a low conversion rate and very little understanding of what we had to offer. It did not work. 

So we changed it up, to this: 

This iteration of our website came into existence  in 2018 – and there are honestly more positives than negatives with this website; 

We captured our four products (at the time, this has now changed), took a more human approach with some of our imagery but the website seemed to lack direction and didn’t embody our brand the way it could have. The image(s) we used were generic, and we came to find that other platforms used this exact stock image too. 

This could also be seen as an indication of where we were brand-wise in the company. There seemed to be a lack of coherence when it came to our tone of voice – we seemed to be switching between a casual and technical tone of voice which tends to happen a lot with many company websites. 

One great thing about Flutterwave is the fact we’re happy to take feedback and put in work into making things better – this applies to our products, work culture, and also, our website. 

So we did the work to improve on our previous improvement. 

Here’s the third iteration of our website: 

Much better, right? 

The purpose of this website was to communicate very clearly who we are and what we do – it did exactly that. We went with clearer copy all through the website, directing people to where they need to go for more information and still included a modified version of our ‘Connecting Africa to the world’ imagery but we made it animated and dynamic. 

The result of this? 

A better understanding of Flutterwave on an abstract level, more time spent on our website and more responses to our calls to action, which led to higher conversion rates. Great right? Good, but not great. 

We could do better, and we knew we could. 

We went back to the drawing board earlier in the year, we tried to think deeply about the user experience on our website and how to pass on our message even clearer. We’ve done this in the past with our previous website but this current one was completely design and user experience-driven. 

The truth is that people are spending less time on websites trying to sift through pointless information that does not answer the questions they have; so we asked ourselves three questions; 

  1. How do we speak directly to someone who is looking for a payment solution within the first 3 seconds of them being on our website? 
  2. What is important to a business when it comes to payments and how can we share that information quickly and concisely?
  3. How do we communicate our values of being customer-focused through the new website?  

The result of all the deep thinking and collaboration between and across teams is the new Flutterwave website.

Let’s take a deeper look into the changes we made: 

We made it more industry-focused

It’s no mystery that our attention spans are shorter now, so when we visit websites we want to spend less time sifting through unnecessary information and go straight to what is important to us. With that in mind, we made it easy for you to find all the information you need on how Flutterwave can help grow businesses in your industry. 

We (finally) moved away from abstract imagery
Believe it or not, there are people behind Flutterwave, and for some reason, we have not showcased the people who make Flutterwave wavy in the past. We decided to switch that up this time, so now as you go through our new Flutterwave website, we hope you enjoy the pictures and videos of some of the amazing people that put the wave in Flutterwave. 

It’s faster and more responsive 

We had to make it faster, more responsive and more intuitive – because you deserve a website that is now 10 times faster than the old one. And so do we.

From a design perspective, we did a lot;
We have been doing a lot of work to reinforce the Flutterwave brand; the long term goal is to make it more coherent, easily identifiable and a reflection of who we are as a company. It’s been a gradual process, and now that we have shared this, you will start seeing more of it as we roll it out. The website is the first phase. 

We refreshed our typography

Typography is one of the strongest ways to express your brand. We didn’t want to stray too far from what our customers are already familiar with so we chose Open Sans as the foundation of the new typeface. We really loved how it turned out but we enjoyed the process of making it a lot more. 

We streamlined our products 

The biggest change here is that Rave is no longer Rave, it’s now Flutterwave. So when we say Flutterwave we will be referring to both the product and the company. Or, sometimes one or the other. So we thought to project the product as one entity which is not independent of the Company name. 

Why did we change this? 

This requires a very detailed, in-depth explanation for the change but the short version of this is that people were finding it hard to make the association between our product Rave and the company Flutterwave. What this means is that they were looking for the online presence of the product, and not the company, which, more often than not, is quite complicated.

Since our payment solution for businesses is what our consumer product(s) run on, there was an overlap between product and company function. So now, Rave is Flutterwave. 

More details on this name change coming soon in a detailed post, we promise. 

Here’s a video we made where we share more about our process;

TL;DR: We changed the Flutterwave website and made it a lot cooler and better in terms of communication, user experience, aesthetics, brand positioning, and most importantly being customer focused with easy navigation which clearly highlights the various facets in business we can help grow with our quick and seamless payment solutions.

Published by Wendy

Head, Branding and Storytelling