Your website is a powerful way to deliver information to your audiences. But if you have multiple audiences, it's difficult to avoid overwhelming them with less relevant information. How do you separate target audiences without losing navigation ease?
Identifying room for growth
One Massachusetts-based nonprofit focuses on the role of relationships in learning. The Foundation has three pillars: the Foundation itself, and two centers that share resources and training opportunities for teachers, parents, families and others. These two centers focus on innovative education and neurodiverse development.
The main goal of the Foundation and two centers is to help practitioners who work with children in schools, therapeutic settings, and homes to build meaningful and authentic relationships with young people. This initiative allows children to discover their passions and develop the skills and knowledge they need to thrive.
Each branch targets a different audience, but their former website had difficulties breaking them apart. For example, teachers who came to the page for resources had to sift through information meant for parents and families, and vice versa. The Foundation connected with LONDONmiddlebury to improve the navigation and organization of their website.
Incorporating dynamic databases and Velo by Wix
The Foundation has a strong voice, and they needed their website design to reflect that. Their former website was one page, documenting all of the information about the Foundation and its two centers. So, we got to work refreshing the site.
We looked for design inspiration in multiple places: The Foundation’s former website, competitors’ websites, and other nonprofits’ websites. We found what we liked and disliked during our research, influencing what we decided to incorporate for the final design.
We wanted to incorporate photos, bright colors, and strong language throughout the site, so we turned to Wix as the content management system (CMS) for this project. Wix is a great place for flexible design, but Velo by Wix and dynamic databases were the most valuable aspect for this project.
Velo by Wix is the platform’s open development platform that adds custom functionality and interactions. With this product, we were able to incorporate custom-coded functionality without losing the low-code/no-code accessibility of the platform. We leveraged Velo to access database collections and develop dynamic pages.
We also developed a custom menu with distinct navigation for three integrated sites: the Foundation itself and the two centers. Having the information for each of these sectors on three different pages yet all under the same domain allows people to find what they need quickly and easily, while bringing awareness to the Foundation’s other initiatives. Each page is clearly its own, themed to fit under the Foundation as a whole yet still cohesive throughout.
The Foundation is a place for parents, families, and professionals to learn, so each Center has its own distinct resource library. This is where we incorporated Wix’s Dynamic Databases. Each resource library is a dynamic page with a database feeding it information from the backend. Instead of having to edit the whole page, they can add the information to the database and it will update automatically. We developed the desired user interface (UI) for searching, filtering, loading, expanding, and collapsing fields and results, all while pulling data from the user-friendly database. This makes it highly accessible for non-coders or businesses with a lot of people updating information on a regular basis.
One of the Centers needed an easy way to register and manage course registrations. By integrating Wix Events, the Foundation is able to host and showcase courses online, register participants, and share updates as needed. To keep in contact with event attendees and send other promotional emails, we provided training on how to leverage Wix Ascend. Now, the Foundation easily sets up automations for different email types.
Once we incorporated all of the elements and had a completed design, we passed the website back to the Foundation’s team, along with tools and guidance for how to use the site going forward.
Impact: Cohesion and ease-of-use
The Foundation has strong values and goals, and now they have an eye-catching and functional website to match that. Each embedded page houses appropriate information for its target audience, making them easy to differentiate from each other. The Foundation has a clean and cohesive overall site that they can be proud of.
