SolusVM / Server virtualisation
The software moved. The site did not.
A decade of continuous development, represented by a site that had stopped keeping up.
Web design
Prototyping
Design system
The Challenge
WebPros
Server virtualisation, hosting infrastructure
Website design, prototyping, modular design system
For an infrastructure buyer, a dated interface is evidence about the product behind it.
SolusVM is the control panel hosting providers use to deploy and manage virtual servers at scale. It is part of WebPros, alongside cPanel and Plesk, and it sells to a technical buyer who judges a product partly on how seriously its own infrastructure presents itself.
The product was current. Everything around it was reading as legacy.
The problem
A dated site ages the product
Hosting providers are buying reliability. A site that looks like it was built years ago quietly answers the reliability question badly, and answers it before anyone reads a specification. This audience reads a website the way it reads a changelog. Dated design does not register as an aesthetic preference, it registers as evidence: an interface that has not been touched suggests a product that has not been either, and for infrastructure that is the one doubt a vendor cannot afford. SolusVM had shipped continuously for a decade and its site had not kept up, so the marketing was actively arguing against the roadmap. There was a second problem sitting underneath it. Two very different people arrive on the same pages. One wants to spin up a trial today and reach the panel without speaking to anybody. The other is running a procurement process for a large estate and needs specifications, licensing terms and a route to a human. A single undifferentiated call to action serves neither, and the site was asking both of them to do the same thing. Marketing also needed to build pages without design support, which meant the answer had to be a kit rather than a set of finished screens. Two prototypes settled the structure before any of it was built, and the system that came out of them is the thing the team now works from.
The signal
Design as proof of maintenance
For infrastructure buyers a current interface is evidence the product is still being worked on. The rebuild brought the site level with the software, so the first impression stopped contradicting a decade of continuous development and started supporting it.
The split
Two buyers, two routes
Self-serve and enterprise want opposite things from the same page. Trial and sales pathways were separated so a provider can reach the panel without talking to anyone, while a large estate gets specifications, licensing and a direct route to a person. The Product menu puts both in front of people at once: Getting Started for the team that wants to try it today, and a free trial with no credit card next to it.
The system
Layouts marketing can assemble
More than twenty five modular components mean new pages get built by the team that needs them, without a design queue. The system holds the rules, so pages stay consistent as the product moves and campaigns come and go. The homepage, pricing, features, solutions and free trial pages are all built from the same blocks, on desktop and on phones.