Undesert Website Redesign Project Case Study

The Challenge:

Undesert has a massive sustainability mission and audiences that are very diverse. The challenge here was to build a sleek website that finds the balance between sharing their mission and communicating the benefits of their technology.

Our Solution:

We decided to redesign the entire website with multiple pages that showcase their patented water purification technology while sharing their altruistic mission.

The Result:

A new website that Nik and Hill are proud to share with investors, new clients, and project supporters.

Undesert was looking for a website redesign that captured their mission and spoke to their audience. We delivered.

Undesert is building a business around their incredible water purification technology and finding climate-positive ways to use the clean water to create resilient change in the world. With such lofty goals, they were struggling with finding the right balance between their altruistic goals and the viability of the technology. Their website swung from being focused on selling carbon credits to saving the oil & gas industry billions of dollars a year in storage fees. Cofounders Nik and Hill knew that if they want to commercialize, it was time for a website redesign!

We don’t know if it was luck or kismet that we connected with Nik and Hill at just that moment, but they gave us the chance to create their marketing strategy and redesign their website and we jumped at it! The Undesert project has the potential to have a massive impact on the issues surrounding access to fresh water. This is a company we want to elevate! We jumped in.

Our Goal with Undesert’s Website Redesign

Undesert has some of the largest goals a company can have. Purifying wastewater from energy and agriculture? Using the water to grow food and forests and make sustainable products? Yes please (but also wow)! While it’s a straightforward concept, you can imagine that the language to connect with an oil executive is different than what you say to a nonprofit tree planting company.

So we pretty quickly identified our main goal as: accurately communicating to various audiences of Undesert. We didn’t want to alienate investors or energy executives with over the top carbon credits and sustainability claims, but we also wanted to make sure that the altruistic mission is clear.

So rather than jumping straight into the website redesign, we started with a Holistic Marketing Strategy. This way we were able to clearly define the ideal digital presence of Undesert, and give Nik and Hill a good idea of how to communicate their big plans to potential clients and investors! After the voice and messaging were balanced, we got to work on the site.

What was once a one-page website with too many voices is now a cohesive site with a vision.

How We Start a Website Redesign Project

With the Undesert website redesign, we started with a strategy. While we don’t always need to start with a fully fledged marketing plan, we do think it is vital to understand the audiences and goals of a business before we build and optimize a website.

This is a core aspect of how we operate Dandelion and all of our holistic marketing strategies. We always want to make it easy for a business audience to take the next step in deepening their relationship. That means making sure that audience members see themselves represented when they visit a website. It also means ensuring that the next step is clear. Getting traffic to a site is great, but what do you want a person to do once they show up?

We think deeply about the customer journey and plan for it using interesting content, facts and figures, and clearly defined pages that offer the information every audience needs to take the next step.

How We Optimized Undesert’s Site for Different Audiences

Undesert has some of the most diverse audiences we have ever worked with. While there will always be a wastewater sustainability champion at an oil and gas company, they typically don’t come at the problem the same way as the wastewater champion from the small shareholder farm. And neither of them think the same way as a nonprofit partner or an ESG investor.

We knew we had our work cut out for us. No matter how we approached this redesign, Undesert would absolutely need consistent communication to keep all of those audiences updated. Undesert’s mission is straight forward: purify wastewater and reforest the planet. So rather than optimizing each section for a different audience, we opted to communicate the same information in a myriad of ways.

Optimizing the Different Pages

First, we worked towards keeping the goal immediately understandable by anyone that lands on the home page. The phrase, “Transforming Contaminated Wastewater into Purified, Usable Water” is simple and very clear. The whole homepage is written in simple language that every reader can understand and get excited about.

Right away we decided that we needed a page dedicated to their proprietary technology too. On that page, we decided to communicate with more industry jargon. So you’ll find information about PPMs (parts per million) on that page. We know that people who are searching for a solution to their own wastewater issues are likely to know their own contamination language and understand that language a bit better.

The “How It Works” page was a bit more of a challenge. This is because we know we need to share the ecological value of the Undesert mission, but sustainability and ESG is a challenging topic in some circles in 2023. It’s easily polarizing and too much hype can make investors turn away. We opted for an educational tone and added optimism and strong statements to bring in an understated excitement around this project.