Bright Orange Thread made the daunting task of launching a new website a seamless process. They were meticulous when transferring old content to the new site and were great about keeping us updated all along the way. We could not be happier with the final result!
John Chaich, Director of Strategic Communications
Long Story Short
AFAR was ready for a website redesign. But first, they had to tackle a huge content hurdle.
They had a website with thousands of pages and more content than they knew what to do with.
The site had a lot of pieces but there lacked a cohesive story to hold it all together.
One positive element, though, was that the content was performing well with search engines. Therefore, we needed a strategic way to preserve SEO value while improving the story for users.
That’s were BOT came in.
We were tasked with creating a new site that utilized AFAR’s content in a way that was easy to understand, inspired action, and performed well with search engines. We also needed to weed out unnecessary content to keep things as clutter-free as possible.
AFAR has three distinctly different audience groups that they aim to reach: donors, scientists, and the general public.
Each respective group needed to easily find the right content for their needs quickly. A donor might be overwhelmed with a list of scientific grants and jargon. And a scientist doesn’t need to sort through pages of explanatory content when they need to find funding opportunities.
Our solution to this problem was to create a navigation system that clearly helped each audience find the content relevant to their pain points.
Since scientists are the group that uses the site most often, we created a dedicated “For Scientist” section for them. Scientists can easily find this hub for funding opportunities and resources with a clear label in the navigation.
The rest of the site organizes content for donors and the public in a way that highlights the impact of AFAR’s work. Strategic story placement and calls to action help donors and the public understand the bigger picture and inspire them to take action.
To help eliminate unnecessary clutter, we ran an SEO audit. This helped us determine what content should stay and what needed to go.
Finally, we used Craft’s content builder to create clean and visibly appealing webpages. The Craft CMS empowers the creation of pages without the need for HTML or development experience. This allows editors to have an intuitive publishing experience that is highly flexible.
The final result is a website that ties everything together in a way that makes sense.
Content for each audience group is separate, but still tied together with the common threads: the continued education, support, and understanding of aging research.