Social proof is one of the most effective tools in B2B marketing—but only if prospects can actually find stories relevant to them. Zello had customer stories, but no dedicated home for them. Stories lived as one-off pages without consistent structure, taxonomy, or navigation. There was no way for a visitor to browse by industry or use case, and no system for the marketing team to publish new stories efficiently.
We needed a hub: a structured, navigable destination that houses our social proof, makes it filterable and categorized, and gives the marketing team durable story pages they can use across direct outreach and top-of-funnel campaigns.
I owned this project end-to-end—defining the content architecture, designing the UI, and building the front-end implementation as the sole IC.
Content Architecture
I started with the content architecture before touching any visual design. Before sketching UI, I mapped the taxonomy that would make stories discoverable and useful.
Every story carries structured metadata: industry vertical, company size, etc. This taxonomy powers filtering on the front end while giving the marketing and sales teams a shared language for surfacing relevant proof points in conversations.
For the reading experience, I established a flexible template system. Each story follows a consistent narrative arc—challenge, solution, results—but supports variable content blocks for pull quotes, metrics callouts, and images. The consistency helps visitors compare across stories while giving writers room to tell each customer’s story authentically.
Building the Platform
Like the Zello web platform, I designed and engineered this system within our existing Eleventy architecture. A structured content model enforces the required metadata and content blocks, making it difficult to publish incomplete or malformed stories.
On the front end, the hub features faceted filtering that updates the URL on each selection—meaning filtered views are shareable. A sales rep can send a prospect a link pre-filtered to their industry, creating a curated experience without manual curation.
I built the story pages with performance in mind: lazy-loaded images with placeholder skeletons, automatic image optimization, and lightweight markup to keep page weight down despite media-rich content.
Discovery and Navigation
The hub landing page surfaces stories through multiple pathways. Rich story cards provide visual entry points for browsing. And an intuitive filtering UI allows for more detailed exploration.
The goal was to make every story page a durable asset: something the marketing team could link to from emails, ads, and sales sequences knowing the page would represent the brand well, load fast, and guide visitors toward conversion.
Outcome
The Customer Story Hub gave the marketing team something they didn’t have before: a scalable system for social proof. New stories publish without design or engineering bottlenecks. Each page is structured, categorized, and immediately discoverable through the hub’s filtering—making the content useful across both top-of-funnel awareness campaigns and direct sales outreach.
In collaboration with the Zello Design and Product Marketing teams