Work

An Inventory Listing Rebuilt on Umbraco for a Trusted Bank Partner

Client

Western Equipment Finance

Industry:

Services:

A stylized photo of a Western State Bank branch.

Western Equipment Finance brought Blend in after a successful Western State Bank implementation to rebuild their site from the ground up — new information architecture, filterable inventory, and purpose-built sales landing pages, all on Umbraco.

Western Equipment Finance (WEF) has spent over three decades helping small businesses and the vendors who serve them move faster. As a subsidiary of Western State Bank, WEF carries a lot of institutional credibility, but their website didn't reflect the connection.

As a kind of "fast follow" to our work migrating Western State Bank to Umbraco, WSB brought Blend back for something bigger: a ground-up rebuild of Western Equipment Finance, starting with discovery and strategy and running all the way through design and implementation.

A site built around the people using it.

Discovery surfaced a clear picture of three distinct audiences:

  • Vendors and dealers come to the site for program information and team contacts — once WEF is on their radar, they refer their customers, making that relationship mutually important.
  • Commercial customers are small business owners who are short on time and need to quickly confirm that WEF serves their industry and can move fast.
  • And the sales team needed landing pages they could share directly with prospects — some public, some link-only for specific deals or industries.

Where the old site treated all three of these audiences roughly the same way, the new site was designed around the differences. Information architecture was rebuilt so that industries surface throughout — on program pages, inventory listings, and Business Development Manager (BDM) landing pages — rather than sitting isolated in one section. Each page type was designed with all three audiences in mind, and the visual design was built to feel unmistakably connected to Western State Bank, giving users the reassurance of a trusted parent institution without losing WEF's own identity.

 

Screenshot of the Western Equipment Finance home page at desktop width. Screenshot of the Western Equipment Finance home page at mobile width.

Western Equipment Finance's home page leans on existing branding to provide a consistent experience.

Inventory that actually works.

The inventory listing was one of the most visible pain points on the old site — a single undifferentiated feed with no way to filter or navigate by category. For vendors and commercial customers who often know exactly what type of equipment they're looking for, that friction adds up fast.

Blend rebuilt the inventory experience in Umbraco with category-based filtering and automatic cross-promotion: featured inventory surfaces on related industry pages and BDM landing pages, driven by the same category system without any manual curation. New inventory listings update in all the right places automatically. The result is a listing that works as a discovery tool, not just a list.

Screenshot of the Western Equipment Finance inventory listing page at desktop width. Screenshot of the Western Equipment Finance inventory listing page at mobile width.

The inventory page provides an overview of all available equipment, designed for discoverability and filtering.

Filtering that gets out of the way.

A better inventory listing is only useful if the filter works, which is why Blend designed the filter interface to be fast and direct — equipment categories are easy to scan, selections are clear, and results update without unnecessary friction. For someone out on a job site with limited time, that matters.

The filter system also ties into the broader category architecture of the site, so the same taxonomy that organizes inventory also powers related content blocks, industry page associations, and the featured listings that appear on landing pages throughout the site.

Screenshot of the Western Equipment Finance Inventory Filter at desktop width. Screenshot of the Western Equipment Finance Inventory Filter at mobile width.

Filters allow site visitors to drill down to exactly what they need.

Western Equipment Finance launched with a site that matched the reputation they'd built over three decades — clear, fast, and built around the people using it. And because Blend already knew the Western brand from the WSB engagement, the work moved with the kind of confidence that only comes from an established relationship. That's the advantage of a long-term partnership: the second project starts further ahead than the first one did.

What Blend did for Western Equipment Finance.

  • Full discovery and strategy engagement — stakeholder workshops, competitive analysis, content inventory, and audience research — followed by a complete design and Umbraco implementation across 15 page types and more than 20 block types
  • A rebuilt information architecture that moved industries from a single page to a site-wide category system, with automatic cross-promotion across inventory listings, program pages, and sales landing pages
  • A filterable inventory listing with category-based filtering and featured inventory that updates automatically based on taxonomy
  • Sales representative landing pages in two versions — public profiles and link-only pages for specific deals or industries — plus Umbraco Forms-powered contact and survey forms and embedded financial calculators
  • Full pre-launch testing and deployment on Umbraco Cloud

Related work.

We’ve done a lot of great things for a lot of great clients — including a lot of bank, credit union, and financial services clients. Check out more projects similar to this one.