Blue Federal Credit Union has served members since 1951, and a recent merger accelerated that growth to 27 branches serving four distinct regions across Wyoming and Colorado. The website grew right alongside the organization, and each added page put more clicks between a member and the thing they came to do. Kim Alexander, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, called the pattern “website creep,” and she wanted the marketing team to feel like branch managers, with real ownership of the site. With ambitious growth goals, Blue needed their website to work as a digital branch rather than a growing archive, run by a team that could change it without waiting on anyone.
Solution
We rebuilt bluefcu.com as a custom WordPress theme designed around the Block Editor, giving Blue’s marketing team a faster, more predictable way to publish. The credit union website redesign is organized around what members and prospects arrive to do, built from a library of modular content blocks and page templates so a new page starts from reliable parts instead of a blank canvas. Two purpose-built systems took on the most error-prone content a credit union publishes: rates that update everywhere from one record, and disclosures that number themselves. The site launched on June 24, 2026, with training and a written website manual already in the team’s hands.
Project Approach
We delivered in three iterations rather than one long build toward a single reveal. Each iteration closed with working templates, components, and content in place, so Blue’s team watched the site take shape and could redirect the work while redirecting was still cheap. Discovery set the priorities: a keep, kill, or combine audit of every existing page cleared the ground for the simplified information architecture, and with 60% of traffic arriving on mobile against 38% on desktop, the new structure was designed from mobile behavior outward rather than adapted down from a desktop layout. Entry patterns showed members bypassing the site’s menus, so the new navigation was built to be worth using again, with concrete targets: key content within three clicks, routine updates published in under 30 minutes.
Blue’s team stayed hands-on throughout. Their Director of Marketing held the single point of contact role, consolidating feedback from marketing, IT, and executive stakeholders so a large group stayed aligned without slowing decisions. In the final stretch before launch, the team hid costumed characters throughout the staging site and turned pre-launch review into a companywide seek-and-find, complete with a bug-report link, so employees explored every corner of the new site before members ever saw it. For the cutover, we staged the new site in a parallel production environment and Blue’s IT team switched the DNS records on June 24, an approach chosen together because it kept bluefcu.com up throughout the transition. An accessibility scan at go-live averaged 89.9% across key pages.
Rates That Change Once and Change Everywhere
A credit union publishes the same rate in many places at once. Product pages, comparison tables, and promotions all carry it, and every rate change used to mean finding each instance across the site and editing it by hand. Slow is the smaller problem. The real risk is a missed instance or a mislabeled figure, because APR and APY are not interchangeable and compliance depends on getting them right everywhere. We built a Rates Management System where each rate lives as a single record with structured fields for APR, APY, and dividend, each supporting up to three decimal places, plus qualifying language chosen from set options like “as low as” or “currently” rather than typed fresh each time. Editors place a rate anywhere in content through a token generator built into the Block Editor toolbar, and each token carries its own display settings. One record can appear as an APY in a comparison table and an APR on a product page, at whatever precision the context calls for, inheriting the formatting around it. When the rate changes, it changes in one place, and a filterable dashboard keeps the library organized as it grows.
Disclosures That Number Themselves
Regulatory disclosures carry the same duplication problem as rates, with a harder rendering requirement on top. Footnotes must be numbered in the order they appear on a page, and the same disclosure can legitimately be footnote two on one page and footnote five on another. Managed by hand across a site this size, that numbering drifts. We built a Disclosure Management System on the same token model: each disclosure is one record, inserted anywhere in content, rendered as a numbered superscript that links to the matching copy in the page footer. Numbering is calculated per page from the order tokens appear in the editor. If one disclosure is used several times on a page, every instance shares a single number and the footer copy renders once. Hovering a superscript surfaces a simplified version of the disclosure through the link’s title attribute, so assistive technology reaches it too. The system also keeps compliance language predictable no matter who is editing, accepting paragraph copy only and refusing to nest one disclosure inside another.
One Menu, Every Screen
Blue’s product catalog is wide, and the header has to carry it: a utility menu, a main menu with a two-to-three-column mega menu, an accessory menu styled as buttons, and the routing number members look for. Rather than build a custom navigation admin the team would have to learn, we extended WordPress’s native menu interface so the work happens where WordPress editors already expect it. Mega menu columns are controlled by a checkbox on each menu item marking where a new column begins, which puts layout in the hands of whoever is editing, without code. The mobile menu was the decision with the longest payoff. Instead of a second menu to maintain, it derives entirely from the main, accessory, and utility menus, so a link added once appears everywhere it should and the phone experience cannot fall out of step with the desktop one. Paired with the CMS training we delivered in April 2026 and the written website manual, menu management is designed to be something Blue sets and then mostly stops thinking about.
The launch went really well and we’re getting positive feedback from our members and from employees on the look, the feel, the user experience. We really value the partnership and the execution through the project.
Josh Houde VP of Marketing & Product Innovation
Blue Federal Credit Union launched a site on June 24, 2026 that is organized around what members come to do, and that its own team runs. Rates update in one place. Disclosures number themselves. A new page starts from a library of parts. The marketing team trained on the platform in April, had the website manual in hand before launch, and by early fall had taken the keys back entirely: content, the back end, and the day-to-day care of the platform all sit with Blue.
That was the point. The redesign was scoped as a foundation, and the information architecture, design system, and CMS were all built to carry what Blue chooses to add next. A prioritized roadmap of enhancements came out of the build, mapped with their team, and when Blue is ready to activate the next round of features or take on heavier lifts, we pick the work back up together. Until then, the site is theirs, which is exactly how it was designed to be.
Considering a redesign at your own credit union? Let’s talk.
