Whew, it’s been a busy couple of weeks for us.
Last week we kicked off a new project with a East Coast university we first worked with roughly four years ago. Back then, we developed a new site structure and design for an HTML site. This time around, we get to customize a content management system (CMS) for them, and we’re taking the opportunity to redesign the interface, take some great new photography, and integrate multimedia (watch for a post on smart, sustainable video sometime soon).
This week we kicked off a project with an international health care association that will include strategy, design, usability testing, CMS customization, and a bunch of other fun stuff.
What struck me as I thought about all we’d seen and heard with each client is the similiarity of need. A total of 30 intake sessions yielded three clear cries for help:
1. Help Us Make the New Site Clear and Easy to Use
Both clients have a clear understanding of their audiences and their expectations and needs. For one client, the challenge lies in breaking past the organizationally driven structure that governs the current site and delivering information to two very distinct audiences in ways that each audience will find intuitive and helpful. For the other, the CMS offers us options for dynamically generated navigation that just isn’t easily possible in HTML.
2. Help Us Tell Our Story
In the association’s case, a major goal is to humanize the org. For the university, connecting prospective students and their parents with faculty and current students is vital. In both cases, our clients plan to lean on storytelling techniques and the integration of social networking content to help their institution come alive.
3. Help Us Help Our Site Visitors to Want to Take Action
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “Tender Is the Night” that “what you want and what you will are all the difference in the world.” So the charge is twofold: to build a compelling for site visitors to apply, to join, to donate, to volunteer, to request more information … and then make doing each of those things as easy and seamless as possible.
Both clients can lay claim to making a huge and positive difference in the lives of the people that they serve, and we get to help them tell that story to the world via their website. I love my job!
Voltaire Santos Miran EVP, Web Strategy I've developed and implemented communication strategies in education for more than 20 years now. I think my team at mStoner is the smartest, funniest, and coolest group of colleagues ever, and I can't imagine being anywhere else. Except Barcelona. Or Paris. Or Istanbul. To quote Isak Dinesen, "the cure for everything is salt ... tears, sweat, and the sea."