Michigan First Credit Union: Website Redesign & Development Improvements

Michigan First Credit Union, originally established as the Detroit Teachers Credit Union in 1926, became the largest credit union in the world by 1952. The company was rebranded as Michigan First Credit Union in 2001 and quickly expanded to meet the needs of their growing clientele. Today, Michigan First Credit Union offers services in a variety of fields, including personal banking, business banking, loans, mortgages and insurance.

Media Genesis (MG) and Michigan First Credit Union have worked together on various digital media projects since 2008. That’s why, when it came time for a website redesign, Michigan First Credit Union came to us.

For this project, we created a custom website theme to match the new designs created by Michigan First Credit Union as well as their recently updated company branding. Both the MG and Michigan First Credit Union teams worked in tandem to review designs, adjust functionality, and refresh existing content and page layouts.

Our Prior Partnership

Leading up to this rebuild phase, Media Genesis also worked with Michigan First Credit Union to restructure their blog and redesign their branch locations page. This landing page uses a Google Maps API for latitude/longitude lookup so users can search by their zip code to find the location closest to them; a piece of functionality that did not exist on the original locations page.

Media Genesis also created branch location pages to help improve the user experience and increase SEO rankings. The new branch location pages include service lines, photographs from individual locations, and location-specific descriptions and hours.

In completing these projects, Media Genesis was able to help Michigan First Credit Union initiate their branding redesign. This immediately led into the site redesign and development improvements that followed.

The Redesign

We began by rebuilding the homepage and implementing a custom website theme based on the design created by Michigan First Credit Union. MG worked closely with Michigan First Credit Union in order to build website pages that accurately reflected already-existing designs.

In addition to changes in appearance, we also implemented new pieces of functionality such as homepage sliders, page banners and titles, and improved navigation on desktop and mobile devices. Users are now able to find the information they seek faster and easier than ever before.

Once this portion of the rebuild was complete, we worked to ensure the homepage was responsive on both desktop and mobile devices – an essential step in order to attain the most ideal user experience possible.

Content Migration

As part of this rebuild effort, Media Genesis and Michigan First Credit Union wanted to improve user efficiency on both the front and back end of the website. To do this, we helped migrate existing content and features from one plugin to another – giving Michigan First Credit Union a more updated way to store and organize their data. This also offers easier, more efficient access to key content.