Navigation:

We knew we had to find a creative solution in order to adequately cover 25 year’s worth of content highlighting annual events without having too long of a page to scroll through. I worked with my developer on a multi-directional approach in which users scrolled up and down between the years and left and right through the events within each year, allowing users to still get all of the information through a condensed process.

Photography:

Looking back, we knew photos were going to be difficult to work with. Most of our photos taken before 2005 were scans of old prints and, as a result, many of the pictures were too low quality to highlight. However, a picture is worth a thousand words, and we still wanted to find a way to feature our old photos in conjunction with past stories.

I settled on using the photos as backgrounds with darkened fades, allowing us to use the images prominently while hiding the pixelation and focusing on the content for each year. If visitors wanted to view the picture, they could hide the overlay but, for the most part, the pictures remained somewhat hidden behind the transparent fade.

Navigation:

One of the biggest problems to tackle was navigation. With our old site, we still had the three main options of “What We Do”, “Ways to Give”, and “Child Sponsorship,” but these options lead to index pages that didn’t take users very far. After running a usability study, we found that most visitors were simply jumping to the footer or running a search to find the pages they were looking for. Either way, we knew our content was too buried and too difficult to access.

The first solution came in implementing the mega menu which provided a drop-down that listed the many pages within each section. Not only was it easier to navigate, but it also reduced redundant pages and allowed for a feature space to highlight donors, announce concert dates for our international children’s choir, and include specific asks that corresponded with monthly campaigns.

Card System:

Throughout the site, we also introduced a new card system that allowed us to easily highlight specific information while improving the site’s consistency. We could use them to feature different projects, donation options that corresponded with our house mailings or even advertise our most recent blogs.

Sponsorship Widget:

Child sponsorship is an important part of World Help’s model and one of the most popular ways that people supported our organization. We wanted to be able to make sponsoring a child as easy as possible, right from our homepage. In the past, we had a simplified widget that connected a donor with a child, but it linked out to a secondary landing page, adding more steps and noise getting between a donor and their ability to sponsor a child.

With that in mind, we re-imagined the sponsorship experience by setting up a tool that allowed users to search for a child by country, gender, and age. From there, it pulled up a series of results that best matched the search criteria, and, in the same window, they could read the child’s bio to learn more or click the “sponsor me” button to streamline the process.