Frontend Development at PensionPro
How can a new sales site template serve the business and their audience? As a front-end developer, I coded custom templates to merge priorities for companies and the people they serve.
Client
PensionPro
Year
2017 - 2019
Location
Harrisburg, PA
Role
Frontend Developer
Deliverables
Consumer Websites, UX/UI Designs
Scalability through Systems Thinking: My time at PensionPro revealed that "One Size" rarely fits all, but one system can serve many. By moving away from manual, one-off updates and developing a modular templating system, I reduced a 40-hour manual newsletter deployment process into just 4 hours of automated script execution. This intervention didn't just save time; it allowed the business to scale its offering to dozens of new clients without increasing overhead, proving that smart frontend architecture is the backbone of a successful UX strategy.
In 2017, PensionPro expanded its portfolio of products beyond software to offer newsletters and websites to Third Party Administrator (TPA) companies through BENEFIT INSIGHTS. This bundling of products would allow a TPA company to have a cohesive sales site, quarterly communication, and a daily project management platform in one package.
From 2017 to 2019, I was the sole employee of the Benefit Insights project, where I created a combination of templated newsletters and websites to use as examples.
As a new product for PensionPro, Benefit Insights did not have a portfolio of work to provide prospective clients. For several months, I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create brand kits for made-up companies to use as examples - GlobalTPA and Total TPA.
Each brand kit had a logo, color palette, and tone of voice. GlobalTPA was based on industry-leading, modern TPA companies. It represented a professional but casual brand identity that spoke to younger firms. TotalTPA was inspired by more corporate, conventional firms with audiences less interested in a captivating web experience. These narratives were used to build four fully functional sales sites, including content writing, responsive design work, and user testing. Click through the four buttons below to view the various template sites.
One of the functional opportunities of purchasing a Benefit Insights’ website was the ability to offer a quarterly newsletter to clients. Benefit Insights had a pre-existing client base that purchased newsletter services, so converting those clients into website customers was a primary goal. However, the process of creating custom-branded newsletters in both HTML and PDF format for a portfolio of clients was time-consuming. A quarterly newsletter launch would take many hours, which would effectively stop other operations. This drop in production led to the question: “How do we create a series of templates and scripts to automate newsletter production?”
Typically, each newsletter would be dropped into the root folder of a client’s website. Afterward, each client’s blog page would be opened, edited with the new line of code, and reuploaded to the server.
I was able to automate the newsletter process for any client that upgraded to a new site… trimming a full week’s worth of manual uploads into a four hour process.
