The original site was created using Wordpress when the company had a slightly different product and was aiming for a different audience. As the messaging changed, new copy had been added, but the existing structure remained. This resulted in a confusing site with a confusing message.

I spoke with stakeholders and users, and conducted a UX review which highlighted areas of duplication, mismatched messaging, and user pain points.

My main recommendations were around the information architecture of the site, bringing the most important information onto the front page, and moving greater detail out of the way until needed.

The About Us area had previously been 3 separate pages: one to recount the story of the company, another to introduce the employees, and a third which replicated some of both of these pages and existed only because the Wordpress template was set up to make the menu item a page. In addition, each employee had 150 words of introductory text.

I recommended changing the menu functionality to remove the unnecessary content, and combining the two remaining pages into one much-abbreviated area. I also suggested grouping employees by department, shrinking introductory text down to a department-specific sentence, and using collapsible trays to show and hide information as needed.

We made the decision to build the new landing site in-house using our own CMS, but much of the functionality needed was pretty similar to Wordpress: relatively static pages, with the ability to add or change images and text, create new pages, and add blog posts. To that end, I worked to design a modular system of page types, allowing all content on the site to be structured in a similar way, but with flexibility depending on message and media.