MDF Commerce is a SaaS leader in digital commerce technologies, providing a broad set of SaaS solutions that optimize and accelerate commercial interactions between buyers and sellers. 

Historically, the procurement process can be tedious, time intensive and overly complex for public procurement teams at the State level. As a part of their eProcurement offering, MDF Commerce works with different States to provide a tailored informational website that integrates its ePro Transactional model.  Each State website is unique to that State’s vendors and procurement process, but MDF Commerce knew that they didn’t need to be creating brand new website templates each time they needed a new State website. 

For MDF Commerce, the challenge lay in designing modern, professional and uncluttered websites with an emphasis on user-friendliness and functionality while maintaining the unique branding of each site in one CMS platform without having to start from scratch for each site. They wanted to build these websites in the HubSpot CMS/Content Hub and wanted to manage all of these client sites in one portal. 

Disjointed Designs Hurt Credibility

The existing websites lacked aesthetic appeal. The layouts were basic, text-heavy and failed to meet modern design standards. Furthermore, the websites lacked visual cohesion. There was no consistency in the branding among the sites. The sites lacked harmonious and unified integration of different visual elements such as shapes, padding, and imagery, making the sites appear disjointed and unprofessional. To top it off, some of the websites were built in CRAFT, making website management and integration with marketing platforms a complex and time-consuming task.

Before Redesign

After Redesign

 

Before Redesign

After Redesign

Before Redesign

 

After Redesign

Building a Flexible, Growth-Focused Template

We wanted to improve user experience, functionality and ensure that each website had a consistent look and feel while maintaining each State’s unique branding. If we were managing each website in multiple portals we could have easily built a standard template and imported it into each portal. However, because we were going to be managing all websites in the same portal we needed to be more thoughtful with our use of parent themes, child themes and global modules. 

We started with redesigning one of the websites with custom modules that were flexible and reusable, using styles, color palettes, and fonts that were consistent across design elements, thus creating a cohesive visual framework that signaled professionalism, trust and credibility.

Next, we built our base theme in HubSpot with the new design with flexible drag and drop modules to fully leverage the functionality available in the HubSpot CMS. We then manually migrated the content from the existing site to the new website, optimizing for SEO as we went. The new theme included custom modules with visual elements that could be toggled on and off with a single click, imagery and text modules that could be transposed with a single click and branding that could be updated globally within a single interface. 

With the new theme created, we then duplicated the theme to create the child themes of the different States, updating the color palettes, logos, imagery, texts and fonts of each site. Now MDFCommerce can manage all of their clients' websites in one portal streamlining their website management and making it fast and easy to launch new websites for their clients.

The Results - Custom Themes With Cohesive Designs in One Portal

MDF Commerce can now easily streamline the management of all their websites with the ability to build out their marketing collateral such as emails, forms, and landing pages with a cohesive design and seamless integration with CRM, email marketing, SEO, and analytics tools, all within HubSpot. The new websites establish strong brand identities and improved user experience that conveys clear messaging. 

Note: Multi-website management is only available to HubSpot Content Hub Enterprise Subscriptions.