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Website Design: 10 Reasons to Love the Homepage of City National Bank of West Virginia

Website Design: 10 Reasons to Love the Homepage of City National Bank of West Virginia

city_national_WV_home

Sometime serendipity leads you to great places. Looking for inspiration this morning, I did a random search on Google for “banks in West Virginia.” The top organic result was City National Bank, an 82-branch bank headquartered in Charleston, West Virginia. If they were a fintech company, we’d be talking about how close they are to becoming a unicorn (current market value is just under $750 million).

And more importantly for our blog, City National has an awesome website. The overall look and feel is great, the polished graphics grab your attention, and it’s limited it to about 60 words of copy. Here’s 10 more reasons why it clicks with us:

  1. Easy-to-find site search: Placed in the upper right with a purple magnifying glass to give it a little extra polish.
  2. Four key items limit the main navigation: Personal | Business | Mortgage | Wealth Management
  3. Functions on personal drop-down menu easily accessible (not shown) includes: “Online and Mobile Banking” and “Online Account Opening” two important functions that are often difficult to find. It also lists “Avoiding overdrafts” first (see #10)
  4. Well designed promo area: The four rotating promos are beautiful, with great visuals and dramatic color.
  5. Visible call to action: The promo includes a specific call to action: “Add your card.”
  6. New-user help within login area: I really like how they split the button into thirds with Login | Demo | Enroll
  7. Account opening choices: It’s important to showcase the ability to open online since that’s still not widely understood. But extra points go to City National for also not forgetting that many (most?) still like the support of opening in branch.
  8. $5 e-statement credit: Great to see the bank sharing the cost savings by ridding the system of paper
  9. Overdraft avoidance: The bank not only uses the O-word (on the homepage no less), but also helps customers avoid overdrafts (see also #3 above) (see note 1).
  10. Suggestion box: After #9, I’m not surprised, but it’s also rare to see this level of encouragement to provide feedback to the bank.

Grade: A

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Note:
1. If you go deeper into the overdraft-avoidance advice, it’s not as consumer friendly as I expected. The bank could do more to promote overdraft-protection options.