Thursday, January 18, 2007

It ain't pretty, but hopefully it's effective

I feel like we're spending a lot of time on the site map/wireframe phase (see the first draft here and here), but I can't help to think that unless we have a rock solid foundation for moving forward our work online may get lost in the shuffle (lots of cooks, revamped focus online, and lots of old, old pages on existing site).

I think developing a sound platform (remember I'm new to the organization) is one reason why I feel so strongly about vetting this process to our focus group, field offices, executive staff, and online community. We're at the crossroads (this project can go many different ways) and I feel the more eyes on the prize the stronger our efforts will be.

Some of my notes are below:


Regarding the image above and below, here's what I've learned (good to keep in mind our objectives) from my interactions:

  • We need better representation of our field offices, i.e. 'In Your Region'.
  • Our organizational campaigns are different than our 'outreach' campaigns.
  • We want dynamic content, e.g. blogs.
  • We want RSS capabilities.
  • We want to utilize existing engagement tools for our 'River Basics' section.
  • We want to give our programs/campaign work a voice in the community.
  • Given the response to our survey, we want to prominently display our action alerts.

In response to the homepage draft above, we've eliminated the clown nose 'Donate Now' button, our signature Most Endangered Rivers campaign, and redundant page links from the left navigation bar.

This is a fairly typical C-frame creation, but I like the direction of where we're going and what we can do online. We have quick links to 'In Your Region' and 'Research Tools' as well as added 'What You Can Do' to the left navigation.

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