Before
The web site for the Credit Union was at least 6 years old when I arrived in late 2013. I was not in Marketing, but had been hired by IT to work on interface design of  various corporate Applications.
My VP, who was also new, thought that my design skills could be put to use and that IT could "bid" internally for a web redesign of our public facing website, essentially doing it all in-house. 
So I embarked on extensive research of Kentico content management sites in the financial space. Kentico was going to be the CMS and it made sense to me, to find similar sites to our category so we knew the capability of the system. The presentation was 60 pages long with many site samples and some competitive in the local market.
These are just a few of the screens that we presented.
As happens in most organizations, Marketing was not about to collaborate with IT and did not consider our offerings, but rather went to an expensive outside agency for the final RFP.
Interim
Because it was known that a full redesign would take up to 6 months, I floated the idea of making an aesthetic change to the existing structure. So the idea was to leave all the basic bones the same, but improve the visual look and feel.
The banner based navigation was an old throwback to early web design. By 2013 it was widely known that users hated banners and considered them more like advertising to be ignored. To keep the basic look I kept them, but made them more scannable, went to a 4x3 grid to bring them higher on the  page.
The goal of this interim step, was to get an immediate brand improvement, while creating the new architecture and design for an entirely new website
After (1)
This was the series of suggested Home Page approaches. The architecture and nomenclature was being guessed at with assumptions that we would refine with close collaboration with Marketing, but that never happened. IT was shut out of the process and the design of the website was created by an interactive division of a traditional ad agency.
After (2)
Another vignette in the series of suggested Home Page approaches
After (3)
This shows the expanded fat Footer (bottom of page). In this design it could be hidden, but it would probably have remained open without the ability to hide.
After (4)
This shows a sample of the drop down menu. I did a screen for each one.
After (5)
This shows a sample of the secondary level page
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A sample site for Learning & Organizational Development consultancy that did not get published. 
It was quite extensive in content, but in the end, the owner felt that new approaches in the field had rendered her approach out of sync with expectations.

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