Have you been wanting to join the Blend team? Well, good news: We're hiring. Check out the full job details.
Translating Design into Optimizely Gold
For the United Nations Federal Credit Union, Blend worked with an existing design team to help translate web discovery and design into a working Optimizely site.
Client
Every credit union promises to be a trusted partner who protects and helps manage their members’ finances. However, not every credit union gets to promise these things to the community of one of the world’s most important institutions: the United Nations.
For Blend, this was another opportunity to do exactly what the United Nations promised: work together toward a common goal to benefit the bigger picture. While in our case, the “bigger picture” had much lower stakes than international peace and prosperity, we did bring several groups together to work toward a common goal of benefitting current and future members of UNFCU.
Blend worked alongside UNFCU’s existing digital design team and consultants to shift the dreams of discovery into the reality of a new Optimizely site. The first phase included a process we call design mapping. Our design team reviewed any third-party or internal designs to determine viability for increased performance — site speed, accessibility, and best practices — and Optimizely’s technology stack. The result of this early consultation gave us the green light to move forward with the provided designs, and we were confident that we could bring it alive through front- and back-end development.
From here, technical planning fueled our agile approach to Optimizely development. We broke the entire build into sprints and epics to keep everyone up to speed and ensure timely and usable feedback between Blend, UNFCU, and any additional teams joining the build. This allowed for training to occur alongside the build, giving the UNFCU team time to begin entering content and handling internal testing along the way.
At launch, all three teams came together to ensure the site was ready to launch, with every design and development note in place and tickets triaged for launch and beyond. More than just a quick site run-through, pre-launch testing includes remediation, performance, and load testing, confirmation of metadata and schema, and creation of 404, error, and maintenance pages. No one wants to think about what happens when the site goes down or gets slow, so we handle the bulk of that before the site is even launched, ensuring a better night’s sleep.
Through it all, we’re proud of our work to get UNFCU live, bringing strategy to life through the “Blend Interactive Way” — constant communication, intelligent and helpful sprint planning, and some excellent work back in the code itself.
Project results.
- Implemented UNFCU’s site using the most recent version of Optimizely.
- Adapted design requirements into a performant and accessible new site.
- Managed the development process from handoff to launch.
Optimizely
Partners since 2008, Optimizely brings your project a best-in-class digital experience, backed by Blend’s years of experience.

Partners since 2008.
Blend has been working with Optimizely and Episerver since 2008, and was named North American Partner of the Year in 2009.

2024 Platinum Solution Partner.
Blend is a Platinum Solution Partner with four Optimizely certified developers on staff.

Setting you up for success.
Blend's history and experience developing custom Optimizely and Episerver solutions equips us to provide top-shelf co-development with your organization's existing development team.