Client:
ThinkCash, Inc. is a corporation with two primary brands in the personal, short-term loan industry: PayDay One and ThinkCash. Both companies handle all loan applications and funds transfers electronically, making the process much more convenient for their customers.

Situation:
ThinkCash, Inc. came to Farstar to conceive and create their new corporate website. They already had separate brand websites for PayDay One and the consumer-facing side of ThinkCash, but nothing that spoke about the company itself. In an industry where it is often difficult to find much information about the parent companies behind the brands, ThinkCash wanted to standout – and above – their competition. 

Objectives:
As with everything related to this client, we wanted to create a website that felt innovative, professional, human and credible – a rare thing in their industry.

Strategies & Tactics:
We knew we wanted to depict what the client calls "the human side of ThinkCash," and felt it was important to rely on actual customers to convey that feeling. Of course, in order to feature customer testimonials, we needed to actually shoot them. We decided to spice up the usual talking-head style of testimonial by capturing our featured customers in what we call a "lifestyle pose" – a vignette of them doing something they enjoy in their free time like playing golf or reading, for example. This required careful planning and coordination. We had the individuals come to the Farstar house, and recorded their testimonials and lifestyle poses during an interview with our founder, Kevin Lofgren. Kevin is also a photographer, and he shot additional still images of the individuals for use on the website. We then edited and composited each testimonial, as well as the stills. Using Adobe Flash^®, we created an interface that was visually interesting and allowed easy navigation for the user to view each of the videos.

Furthermore, ThinkCash wanted to include Blog and Jobs sections that could be easily updated by their employees. We configured a WordPress blog interface that ties directly into their API – the client can just go into that interface, write or edit their posts, hit "publish," and the posts are live on their site.

Having a blog on the website helps immensely with search engine results and keeping the site fresh. If you don't have this as part of your web strategy, you should. Talk to us about that.

Results:
We're very pleased with the outcome. In our opinion, this website met all of its objectives. More importantly, the client agrees. Here's the final home page below. But it's a bit more exciting if you check out the real thing.

The home page has a rotating assortment of photographs of PayDay One customers, ThinkCash customers, and ThinkCash employees. It also includes a feed of the four most recent blog entries.

When the user clicks on an individual on the right, that person's testimonial video plays in a small pop-up window.

ThinkCash employees can update and push blog entries live to the site whenever they choose using WordPress API's we connected to the site.

The Management page also needed to reinforce the fact that ThinkCash is a friendly company. We want current and potential customers to think "These are real people I can trust." We took these photos individually and then combined them to appear as though we actually got all of them to smile perfectly at the same time. ;-)

When the user rolls his or her mouse over an individual, that person's bio shows up on the right. These are "lifestyle" photos provided by the individuals themselves in order to reinforce the fact that these are real people, like you or me.

View The Website

And finally, the truest test of all. An actual customer (during the taping of her testimonial) makes a comment about how the "real people" on the website made her feel that ThinkCash was trustworthy: