Custom Web Design & Development / UI UX / WordPress
Benedictine, a non-profit organization located in Ridgely, MD, assists children and adults with developmental disabilities to achieve their maximum potential. They sought a partner with the required skills to highlight their missions, values, and community impact through a visually engaging and informative new website. Our goal was to design and create a cutting-edge website that offers an intuitive user experience, effectively captivates the target audience, and allows for easy and intuitive content updates.
To get started, we focused on enhancing user experience through the creation of a detailed visual sitemap. This sitemap served as a clear guide to the website’s structure, pages, and hierarchy, making navigation intuitive and straightforward.
Secondly, we established a comprehensive website style guide to maintain and promote the brand’s identity. This guide specified the brand’s colors, fonts, and overall aesthetic, providing a consistent and appealing look across the entire website. The style guide proved to be invaluable for the website’s scalability and growth, enhancing the overall user experience by providing a uniform visual identity.
The design process began by establishing critical User Interface (UI) elements, including the header, footer, and calls-to-action, to ensure a cohesive and consistent experience throughout.
Our next step was to lay out the key pages vital to the success of the site’s strategy. This included the creation of the homepage, landing pages, staff pages, resource pages, and a comprehensive blog. We designed each page with the unique objective of the page in mind, taking into account existing content and introducing new messaging where needed to best meet the goals for each page. These strategic design choices allowed us to create a site that was not only visually appealing, but also functional and effective.
During this phase, we implemented a scalable grid system to guarantee the best browsing experience possible across all devices. This system enabled us to uniformly and smoothly scale elements like fonts, images, and graphics, along with layout spacing across devices. As a result, all elements were harmoniously scaled, ensuring maximum readability and seamless browsing on any device.
A primary objective of this project was to create a website accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities, in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). From the earliest stages, we ingrained web accessibility best practices into our process, including appropriate text size, color contrast, and more. We also incorporated AccessiBe, a tool that enhances accessibility for individuals with visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor impairments. The result is a user-friendly website accessible to an extensive range of users, demonstrating Benedictine’s commitment to inclusivity and accessibility.
Our initial discussions with the client revealed that their previous website was challenging to navigate and not user-friendly on the backend. Therefore, we set a goal to make the backend as intuitive and easy to use as the frontend.
To accomplish this, we initiated a plugin audit to minimize the number of plugins needed to manage the site’s functionality. This audit allowed us to equip the latest version of the website with even more features while reducing the plugins by half compared to the previous version.
Additionally, we customized the client dashboard, creating a cleaner, more user-friendly, and branded interface. This interface was specially designed to make key actions quickly and easily accessible, enhancing the usability of the website.
The outcome of these efforts is a streamlined dashboard that simplifies content editing, making the website more efficient and user-friendly.
Working under a strict deadline, we diligently ensured every detail of the project was meticulously handled. To ensure the website was launched in a timely manner, each element was carefully reviewed not once, but twice. This thoroughness facilitated an efficient final pre-launch testing phase. The result of our dedicated efforts was a seamless launch process. The newly launched site was greeted with widespread acclaim from the client, underscoring our commitment to delivering high-quality results within set timelines.
Since the launch of the project, we have seen significant improvements across all performance metrics. Our efforts have led to an increase in search traffic, user engagement, clicks, and the time users spend on each page. In short, the site has been a resounding success with visitors. Equally important, we’ve received extremely positive feedback from our client and their team, affirming the success of our mission.
This project was not merely a task for us; it was a commitment to achieving excellence and creating something we take immense pride in. The opportunity to collaborate with such a commendable organization has been an honor for us.
We always aim for this level of success in our projects and will continue to strive for even better outcomes in the future.
If you’re interested in discussing your own website project, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve your business goals.
