Urban Institute: Web Site Redesign
www.urbaninstitute.org
The Urban Institute is a nonprofit nonpartisan policy research and educational organization established to examine the social, economic, and governance problems facing the United States. It provides information and analysis to public and private decision-makers to help them address these challenges and strives to raise citizen understanding of the issues and tradeoffs in policy-making.
The Challenge
The Urban Institute had come to realize that its Web site was not serving the organization or its audiences well—it had become impossible to relate content together, the site relied upon a confusing navigation scheme that was not topical, and the design lacked an engaging and appealing presence. Urban retained Beaconfire to give its Web site a makeover to better serve the needs of its priority audiences.
The Solution
Beaconfire worked closely with Urban to achieve several interrelated objectives: improving the site architecture, design, and overall usability of the site to appeal to a range of audiences; migrating the site to a new content management system (CMS); and improving site performance in a way to allow site deployment in a scalable hosting environment able to handle spikes in user traffic. Beaconfire started the process by collaborating with Urban to evaluate the existing homepage and devise a vision statement for a redesigned Web site.
Urban’s vision statement emphasized that the new site should reflect a solidly branded, aesthetically appealing Web representation of the Institute; that it should allow users to quickly and easily find the information they seek; and that it should extend the Urban Institute brand and use templates and content in the most flexible manner possible.
In assessing the site architecture, Beaconfire started with an examination of the topical listing on the current site—in all, 20 research categories contained an overwhelming 111 topics. A careful reorganization trimmed that to 4 categories displaying 18 topics. Beaconfire also worked with Urban to integrate their publications database with a user-friendly content management system and developed an attractive new design that projects the think tank’s brand of credibility, authority, and objectivity.
The Urban Institute also desired to offer its various audiences the chance to receive timely information on specific topics of interest. Through a suite of RSS feeds, the site now enables government officials, journalists, and researchers to sign up for automatic notification of new publications on the topics that interest them.
The new site at www.urbaninstitute.org is easier to manage and gives users streamlined access to the resources they need.
“The new site offers the best of both worlds,” said Cara McWalters, Beaconfire project manager. “Staff spend less time on care and feeding of the site, and constituents find what they want faster.”