Housing Humboldt is a fantastic local nonprofit organization dedicated to helping and providing housing to low income individuals, families and seniors. When we were approached by one of their directors about helping to provide a website at a discounted rate, we were more than happy to help lend our time, energy and skill sets to get a new website off the ground and help the organization reach people.
Create a new website that better displayed their available property profiles, and had a strong homepage call to action for people to contact and get help, while also encouraging businesses to become partners. All of which needed to be easy to maintain and updated by the staff.
We knew immediately that we were going to craft a responsive site to provide a more user friendly and accessible website. Next we turned out attention to reformatting their original homepage into key sections to split the wall of text up into quickly digestible sections for a better Call to Action. We then focused on revamping their property profiles to increase the speed that they load, and increase the information associated with each property to help people make more informed decisions.
- We were able to craft a beautiful and clean website that is easy to update by the staff.
- The site is significantly more user friendly and capable of being accessed on all devices thanks to it’s responsive framework (which also provided a huge SEO Boost).
- Housing Humboldt's Properties are now displayed in a clean fashion providing significantly more information to users.
- The new websites contact form has received over 140 inquiries for properties in just three months since the site has been launched. Which means that people are finding the site and utilizing it.
Dedication to community
"Our love for our North Coast roots runs deep..."
Housing Humboldt’s website had fallen into a state of ill repair. Not by anything the staff had done, but the sites backend framework had simply stopped working and proved too cumbersome for the staff at Housing Humboldt to tackle. When one of their directors Bob Lawton approach our team about helping Housing Humboldt clean up and refresh their online image we knew we had an opportunity to not only help out a local non-profit, but to also help the community that we live in. This was a golden opportunity to ask ourselves not only: “how will this make our client happier, more effective, more success?” But to also ask ourselves: “how will this make our community happier, more effective, more successful?”
Our love for our North Coast roots runs deep, and being able to help the greater community that helps us drove us to take on the challenges of Housing Humboldt’s website needs.
A homepage that speaks
When we sat down with Beth Matsumoto, a key staff members at Housing Humboldt, we quickly realized that there was frustration stemming from their website not presenting a clear call to action for visitors to understand who they were.
We decided that the best course of action was the present their slogan “connecting families & homes” loud and clear, while also promoting their mission statement to front and center on their homepage. Furthermore, we capitalized on two focal points of their organization (Property Management and Affordable Homeownership) to provide even more clarity to a visitor about this organization's goals. In many ways this information was already present on their old site, however it had become lost in a wall of text. By splitting the information up into quick digestible segments we were able to highlight what needed to be said quickly for visitors.
How we reformatted the homepage for maximum effectiveness
Below you can see a screen capture of Housing Humboldt new website with some text sitting above it. This is the text that appeared on the original homepage. Because there was no break in the content, or any idea what was being addressed the text on the old site would be skipped by visitors. By taking that same content and breaking it into three distinct sections we were able to let the original content sing much louder and ultimately provide information to visitors quicker.
In the example below:
- The red box highlights the mission statement
- The green box highlights the Property management part of the organization
- The yellow box highlights the affordable homeownership part of the organization
Text as it originally appeared on the Homepage
Property Profiles
When we began the project one of Beth’s goals was to overhaul the property profiles to display a more rich presentation of the individual properties through better use of images, and information regarding these properties. What they really needed was a clear and clean fashion for people to explore.
We were able to solve this by creating an easy to update section dedicated to homes, which can automatically pull highlighted properties to a display on the homepage. In addition, we set up a system that quickly filters the properties into two types without the need for changing pages through Ajax programming techniques (1). This ultimately leads to a display of the properties that is not only more accessible, more user friendly and more informative, but is also easier to maintain.
- Ajax Programming - this is web develop term utilized to describe asynchronous web applications which can load content without affecting the display or behavior of the current page. This method provides better interactivity, can simplify navigation and is great at compacting information.
dynamic, easy to use, fast to load
Below is a screen capture of Housing Humboldt's new property profile display. This GIF demonstrates how the site is able to filter the content quickly into categories without having to switch pages, which ultimately speeds up the process by decreasing the amount of data required to make the change. For a website that is to accessed online via more data sensitive connections from smartphones, this is critical in providing a fast and seamless experience for users. Instead of having to load an entirely new page the filter simply reloads the content within that one section on a page.
Footer Call to Action
The homepage now features a footer with a multi-purpose Call to Action for people and businesses to get involved and help out. Housing Humboldt can now display their partnerships big and bold for the world to see.
