THE GAME PLAN
The Concussion Legacy Foundation redesign project presented many challenges. The organization was changing their name from the Sports Legacy Institute and had 4 websites that needed to be combined into one. The project required a new logo, tagline ideas, a mobile optimized design, extensive information architecture and content revisions, search engine optimization (SEO) and a user-friendly/flexible content management system.
FIRST STEPS
We first started by diving deep into understanding the organization's brand. We used a Brand Profile to facilitate this process. The document covers the following:
- What is the brand mission and promise? How will the logo and website support these?
- What are the brand attributes and differentiators including the pros and cons of the organization's image?
- Who are the stakeholders and their personas?
- What organizations are relevant and worth emulating?
- How well aligned is the content with the SEO target keywords and stakeholder personas?
- How can the site improve fundraising efforts?
TEAM EFFORT
During the Discovery Phase we had a designer, marketing specialist and a project manager work with the client’s team, including founder Chris Nowinski. These early meetings established brand guidelines, tagline ideas, creative direction and the information architecture.
The completion of the Discovery Phase included sign off on the sitemap, wireframes and updated Project Plan. Then it was on to the Design Phase which included more collaboration with the client to complete the logo and site design. We built the site and worked with the client to integrate the content. Other actions included SEO optimization, QA and testing until the site was ready for launch.
HIGHLIGHTS
Stories: The site includes many powerful stories about athletes impacted by concussions.
Lists: The site uses accordion style lists that open and close. These are helpful for efficiently displaying content. The lists helped to clearly outline post concussion steps.
Branding: We designed several logo ideas until the final version was selected
Statistics: This row of stats initially animates, calling attention to the importance of the information.
RESULTS
The site had over 32,000 visitors within 4 months of launch, with 80% of those visitors being new to the site. It's a popular resource for those inside and outside of the medical field, especially as concerns with concussions in sports continue to rise.
The CLF team actively edits and adds pages to the site. Making this process easy was a key goal for the project. The site was built with the content management system Drupal which includes an easy to use website editor and a flexible backend architecture.
