Snappy New Home Page

Northwest Community Credit Union

Northwest Community Credit Union is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative born and raised in Oregon. We’ve been a feature of the Pacific Northwest since 1949. Our mission is simple: build member wealth. While we started helping forestry workers meet their financial needs, times have changed. Today, more Oregonians play in the great outdoors rather than work in them. Our “community charter” allows us to assist most Oregonians throughout the State.

Northwest Community Credit Union--Northwest of Banking—is a charismatic brand. We use the term charisma become it is our technique to be memorable and garner more attention than our size and budget would indicate or allow.

Northwest of Banking is both an internal and an external message. First it’s an internal organizational commitment to create and deliver the best possible products and services. As a market message, it is designed to address two challenges: Make clear that Northwest Community Credit Union is an alternative to banking as usual and that Northwest Community will exceed your expectations.

As a not-for-profit cooperative, we are not preoccupied with delivering profit to remote investors. The only “investors” we need to satisfy are our customers—what we call members. In a nutshell, that’s what we mean by Northwest of Banking.

We want our new website to appeal to modern, youthful Pacific Northwesterners. Our ideal visitors are people who are busy working, going to college and playing and want to spend minimal time at the bank. Our busiest branch is our website. We want it to be modern, hip, and technologically cutting-edge.

• We would like a professional, clean looking home page design that communicates our professionalism, our unique Northwest character and sets us apart from our industry and our peers.
• We focus not only on local people, but also their communities. We are an industry leader in social media. We want our new site to help us improve our community work by facilitating connections among and between our members and prospective members.
• It needs to be made very obvious that we really are just one click away.
• We are looking for a home page layout that we can tweak to create other templates for the interior pages. We will be using multiple technologies to create the site, so we will need to adjust the design as we move forward with our site redesign.
• Please provide the design as a layered psd file with any other graphics so they can be manipulated for further modification.
• Refer to the wire frame mock up for more layout details. See attached file.

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Today, most financial institution websites are indistinguishable. Our website needs to be logical and easy to navigate, yet it must also be an authentic extension of our slightly quirky, charismatic Northwest brand. A big part of our brand is personality. Our web site should help visitors feel that they’re just one click away from talking with a real person. (We’ll give you logo files and other printed materials to work with and TV ads to see, which we think are probably the best of our media at conveying our Northwest-y-ness.)

Here are some of the must have's, feel free to take creative license with the rest.

• Refer to the wire frame mock up for more layout details. See attached file.
• Use existing logo (files provided). Please don’t alter it in any way, besides scaling it to fit the location on the page.
• Font for image-based header text should be Cafeta and should be all in capitals.
• Font for image-based lowercase text should be Avenir (please use a san serif font of your choice if you do not have Avenir).
• Preferred web-safe font for text is Tahoma, Geneva or other similar sans serif font.
• We must have these elements on the page: (image rotator and on-line banking login. See wire frame mock-ups for details.)
• On-Line Banking login must contain existing fields and remain together. Background color and size of the boxes can change, but this form will always need to be iFramed in from our vendor, where we have minimal design control.

https://www.nwcu.com

Why a new web design?
Our Northwest of Banking brand strategy was launched in 2009. The brand work started inside the organization and has slowly been introduced to the public through printed materials and physical branch enhancements. Our website has been one of the most challenging items for us to tackle. We want our new website design to reflect the attitude and energy of the new brand. Additionally, we acknowledge that our existing site is quite dated. We are not attached to any of the existing design elements.

For more about us, you could check out our blog: http://thatssonorthwest.com

http://www.crateandbarrel.com/ layout packs in a dizzying amount of promos/attractions while avoiding the feeling of being too cluttered.

http://www.umpquabank.com/ layout and information are clean and visually appealing.

http://woot.com/ Simple, clean, fresh, extreme focus.

http://www.cafeyumm.com/ site reflects brand completely – simplicity – communicates more than just product – fun in navigation, very interactive, fresh.

http://www.starbucks.com/ works the whole brand – communicates exactly what they want.

https://www.vancity.com/ Style! Functionality!