Slickdeals Money
An editorial hub from the Slickdeals deal gurus covering all things personal finance
As personal finance nerds ourselves, we were over the moon to learn that the small but mighty editorial team at Slickdeals Money was seeking a new partner for their site redesign. We worked closely with the Editorial and Design teams to build a responsive WordPress theme that leverages Gutenberg and gives editors countless robust tools for content creation.
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what we did together
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Results of the redesign
- 53% Increase in user engagement
- 70% Increase in page clicks
A collaborative and immersive discovery and user experience phase with content creators
We held deep dive meetings with the editorial team at Slickdeals Money in order to understand their vision: a destination that “meets you wherever you are on life’s financial journey.” In addition to conducting competitive audits of other players in the space (Points Guy, Nerd Wallet, Forbes Advisor), we discussed other editorial content that the Slickdeals team was looking to create (including personal stories about how savvy folks optimize their finances).
A visual design system unique to Slickdeals Money that feels in sync with the Slickdeals parent brand
We worked closely with Slickdeals’ Head of Design to ensure that our newly established visual system incorporated the Slickdeals parent brand’s core brand elements (typography, color, illustration style). At the same time, we recognized that we needed to modify the Slickdeals proper brand somewhat, adding a level of seriousness to fit with the content and alongside recognizable competitors in the space. We added a layer of definition to the existing color palette by tying each color with a different content type. Separating the colors in this way allowed us to avoid the more playful, ‘rainbow’ look of the parent brand by ensuring that only one primary brand color would be dominant on any single page. The design system uses a defined spacing system to ensure consistency across the theme as well as across device sizes.
Tools built to make editors’ lives easier, including a rich library of Gutenberg modules and plugins to optimize approval workflows
We designed countless, custom Gutenberg modules to allow content creators the ability to avoid overly text-heavy articles and tell compelling, data-driven stories that include tabular data, photography, embedded tools and calculators, cross-promoted relevant articles, and more. We also worked closely with editors to understand their internal workflows and approval process. This research helped us define and implement backend workflows (leveraging PublishPress and Multicollab) that dramatically increased the editorial team’s efficiency (including approvals, fact checking, and more).
Tools to help users evaluate financial products, including an integration with the Slickdeals API
The site features a bevy of useful tools for the savvy personal finance consumer, including marketplaces which offer editorial opinions about the best financial products. We approached the build of these marketplace pages strategically to help the editorial team ensure content accuracy. The back-end developers at Simpatico collaborated with Slickdeals engineering and built a custom process that pulls the data automatically from an API to ensure data accuracy. Additionally, as it made sense, many values are calculated based on a centrally defined set of values (e.g. the USD equivalent of American Express points), reducing the amount of manual work that content creators need to do to keep the site up to date and accurate.
