SRR: Stout Risius Ross

Stout Risius Ross (SRR) is a financial advisory services firm serving global and middle-market clients. The firm specializes in Investment Banking, Valuation & Financial Opinions, and Dispute Advisory & Forensic Services. SRR’s clients range from Fortune 500 corporations to privately held companies in numerous industries around the world.

Headquartered in Chicago, SRR also services its clients from offices in Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C.

Goals

SRR’s impressive inventory of thought leadership content was imprisoned in PDF documents derived from their print publications. They approached Duo to help liberate this content from this web-unfriendly document format. Strategically, they wanted to put this information to work by validating their core competencies to distinct clients and prospect market segments within the context of their service offerings.

They requested that the site provide simple and clear segmentation to direct visitors to content relevant to any one of their thirteen identified audiences. The new site would make the content easily searchable by targeted visitors within organic search results, and offer a process that would allow visitors to follow through with a meaningful business action. Additional goals included attention to, and respect for, the behavioral characteristics of the targeted audience, and providing an information resource to build and sustain client loyalty. Their overarching requirement was that the site be welcoming and aesthetically pleasing.

Solution

Duo worked with the content provided by SRR upfront, now in the more versatile html, and migrated the updated information to Drupal, an open-source content management system. This ensured that once Duo’s construction of the new site was completed, the client would be able to easily access and update content as needed.

An uncluttered homepage presents visitors with an interactive menu listing the three major service groups offered by SRR. Simply mousing over a group selection expands the menu to detail the services offered within that specific category. One click will bring you to the appropriate interior page.

Interior pages boast clean and unique layouts that contain detailed descriptions of services, as well as links to related articles, news and events, and professionals. These visitor-friendly pages include drop-down menus that make it quick and easy to navigate to other SRR services, segments, or industries.

In addition to the simplified navigation, Duo’s design team added a directory to browse professionals within the SRR database—further eliminating the need for unnecessary clicks and page re-directs and accelerating access to the information each visitor sought.

The implementation of third-party site integration with job posting site Cytiva.com allows visitors to interact with the SRR professionals without leaving the SRR site. The new interface features a page for the SRR Journal, which includes an interactive display showcasing the covers of individual issues of the magazine that allows users to click on the image of a specific edition, browse the featured articles as well as subscribe to the semi-annual publication.

Usability was important for site administrators as well. Duo’s developer, Scott Weston, used the theme “Rubik” for SRR’s site administration page. He also created a custom administrative module called “Galley” for the page, which he built as a port from an older and proven Duo Consulting Content Management System galley.

Results

The team at Duo created a new user interface with direct and segmented navigation that makes it easy for the time-crunched professional to gain access to the database relevant to their specific interests, without sacrificing any of the rich and informative content.

Using graphic design based on SRR’s content, branding, and style guides, Duo’s designers integrated unique and colorful images to supplement the minimalist layout, creating a final product that is not only highly efficient for site visitors and administrators but beautiful to look at, and much more vibrant than the original white background.

The custom made administrative Galley module uses vertical tabs to divide up the content in a clear and easy to manage format, providing the same user-friendly access for the content administrators in the private back end of the site as is available to the visitors coming from the public front end.

William Jefferson Black, the Director of Business Development for SRR and Duo’s principal contact during the site’s development, was incredibly pleased with the outcome, saying, "Our goals were met and we are very happy with the new site.  The process was challenging, but DUO helped us work through all of our technical and creative needs." SRR & Duo intend to now turn their attention to additional enhancements which exceeded the scope of work required to launch the site.