content strategy
OVERVIEW
Hands of Kindness Children’s Ministry is a nonprofit organization seeking to improve the lives of children in Uganda, Africa through sponsorship and providing aid via mission trips.
Mattox Law is a Virginia based law firm focused on serving its clients with quality representation in traffic related cases throughout the Commonwealth.
Both businesses had established websites that were self built and in need of refresh to a platform to help meet and grow their business goals.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Project coordination and management for website transition
Content review and analysis including navigation and site structure
Site transition to WordPress from other CMS
OUTCOMES
Optimized site navigation and content presentation
New site design focused on business objectives and balances user needs for site experience
Improved tools and capabilities for business owners to grow their customer engagement
SPECIFICATIONS
TIMELINE: 4 weeks (Hands of Kindness), 8 weeks (Mattox Law)
TEAM: Solo Project (with Client Direction)
PROJECT SOLUTION: WordPress
DEVICES:
PROCESS AND IMPLEMENTATION
CLIENT CONTENT QUESTIONNAIRE
- What business goals do you have for your company in the next 6-12 months?
- Who are you trying to reach with your website?
- Do you have a content calendar or editorial process in place?
For each of these projects, I began with understanding the business needs. We worked to understand areas of their current sites that were not working, features or functions they’d like to be able to do with their website and how they understood their customer.
To help my clients understand the changes expected for the new site, I created a sitemap for review. Some of the updates were easily expected and a few required deeper discussion about the intent of the content of their site. These discussions helped define the scope of the project and set delivery expectations for the new site.
Each of these projects had their own challenges with scope or stakeholder constraints. To address this, wordpress themes were chosen with low complexity to encourage the business owner to keep content relevant. Necessary plugins for forms, SEO and performance were installed to keep competing plugin issues at bay. After sitemaps and initial site plans were reviewed and approved by client, site migration and new site build began.
USER TESTING
When the build was mostly complete, it was time for feedback. To gather the most valuable feedback for myself and the client, user interviews were conducted to gather feedback from users. Any trends or repetitive concerns from the interviews were provided in summary to the client for discussion and additional updates were made to the site prior to final approval.
DELIVERY AND OUTCOME
HANDS OF KINDNESS CHILDREN'S MINISTRY
For Hands of Kindness, the site was already in WordPress – it just needed theming and content restructuring. This took approximately four weeks from site map approval. The Hands of Kindness site was launched in the spring of 2019.
Improvements to the HOKCM site included a social media feed to increase visibility to organizations social content and presence, a main source of their fundraising. In addition, child sponsorship was updated to include a direct link to sponsor and easier way to see available sponsor needs.
MATTOX LAW
Mattox Law was a full site migration from Squarespace, and a significantly larger site to address with blog and article pages as well. Mattox Law’s site build took approximately 8 weeks from sitemap approval. The site featured focused pages by locality as many of the firm’s clients will visit the site based on where the offense took place.
The Mattox Law site launched in March of 2020.
Improvements to site architecture also included a traffic blog, that allows for existing and new content related to traffic offenses and court system changes to be shared.