JobsOhio

JobsOhio is the state's private, nonprofit economic development corporation. Its website is the first stop for site selectors, executives and talent weighing Ohio against every other state — and the legacy platform had grown into hundreds of loosely connected pages that were hard to navigate and harder to maintain.

The site had grown beyond the infrastructure it was built on, and JobsOhio needed a platform ready for the growth, conversion and lead-generation work it was planning. The Shipyard was selected to bring the whole experience forward in a modern strategic, visual and technology framework. The brief was clear about priorities: the site had to be a business development tool first, easy for internal teams to manage, and built to collect leads through both soft and hard calls to action, while giving talent audiences a clear path through to Ohio's recruitment programmes.

The work ran from customer and stakeholder research through a UX-led redesign and new visual design, technology consulting and development, analytics measurement planning and conversion-rate optimisation testing. The new JobsOhio.com launched in November 2025 alongside a large-scale creative campaign built to drive attention to the organisation and to the site itself.

The information architecture was organised around the way a company evaluates a state. Why Ohio, Site Selection, Industries, Incentives and Workforce answer the questions a site selector asks, in the order they ask them, with About and Newsroom supporting the case. Every section carries its own conversion pages, so a visitor is never more than a step from a soft call to action that invites further exploration or a hard one that starts a conversation with the JobsOhio team.

Component wireframes and a functional specification fixed the behaviour of each module, so the same paths, forms and calls to action worked identically on every template. A measurement plan tagged those interactions from the start, form starts and submissions, CTA clicks, navigation and downloads, feeding HubSpot and the analytics dashboard, so the team can see which pages generate leads and tune the experience through conversion-rate optimisation testing.

The new JobsOhio.com launched in November 2025 with a large-scale creative campaign driving attention to the organisation and, specifically, to the new site. In the nine months that followed, December 2025 to August 2026, the site recorded 2.6 million page views and 1.7 million users, 54% and 37% ahead of the previous nine months, and captured close to 6,000 form submissions through HubSpot. Visitors arriving from organic search stay for an average of three minutes and ten seconds. Every interaction is instrumented for reporting and optimisation across all traffic channels, an analytics dashboard gives the team a single view, and conversion-rate optimisation testing is under way. Day to day, the team now runs a lightning-fast site on a CMS it can manage itself.