Rebuilding the House

We have finally come to the end of a long, but very worthwhile process—the total and complete overhaul of our website. And as I attempt to boil the last year down into a blog post, I hope you find the process enlightening, and get a sense as to the thinking that drove this process.

This began almost exactly one year ago, when we sat down as a team and asked a very simple question—what are the most important things our new website should do? The criteria we created not only guided the selection process, but shaped the website that you see today. They were as follows:

1. Have a way to efficiently browse content for both the consumer and the industry professional. Because of the technical limitations inherent in our old site, industry professionals had only a small icon in the upper-right corner to gain access to the wealth of resources waiting for them. Which brings me to #2…
2. Dramatically revise the site structure and navigation, so as to aid content discovery. Our old site had so many navigation items, along with sub-navigation and even sub-sub-navigation, that it often proved very difficult to find what you were searching for.
3. Build social media into our site in a real and integrated way. When we began this redesign process, we had nearly 125,000 Facebook fans (today we are over 200,000), but there was zero tie-in to that on our site.
4. Incorporate our blog into the site, and try to build a ‘newsroom’ model of continuous content creation. Our blog had hundreds of articles written over the course of several years. And yet it was very difficult, if not impossible, to search the blog to any real extent. It remained on the periphery, even though it was the most content-rich part of our site.
5. Create a new video section of our site, where videos could be discovered and viewed easily. We are a storytelling organization, and our videos are among our most powerful assets. Yet more often than not, we directed people to our YouTube channel because of the limitations of discovering the videos on our site and of watching them.
6. Design the new site in such a way as to capitalize on mobile traffic. At this point last year, mobile (both tablets and phones) accounted for nearly 20% of our traffic, and we knew that would only increase.

Once we had those goals listed out, developing a “request for proposal” that we could send to design firms to find the best one was a straightforward process. From a field of roughly 15 firms, we selected Domani Studios, out of Brooklyn, N.Y., a decision that would prove very fortuitous, as they have been amazing partners in this process.

Content is king

We knew that we needed to take a comprehensive look at our engine—the content that we use to inform and educate consumers. It had accumulated over the years, and was now so large that many sections had to be re-written from the ground up.

Once we had the designs finalized, we were finally able to interact with the content on the test site as a consumer would. It was exhilarating to see the new content laid out in clean designs. However, we saw where we could greatly improve the user’s experience.

Our old site was like the proverbial shopping mall—information was everywhere, but you had to stumble across it. With this new site, we decided to help consumers through the steps of both understanding why they needed insurance coverage and then how to get it. This step-by-step process looks like this:

1. Understand if they have an insurance need
2. If so, discover how much insurance coverage they may need, using one of our newly redesigned calculators
3. Then, find out what types of options they have to help cover their needs
4. And finally, understand how they can they purchase or get coverage—it might be through the workplace, an agent (using our completely revamped Agent Locator), or by selecting a company or online option

A whole new world for industry professionals

And this wasn’t even the largest change to our content. As we began to work through the information architecture (IA) stage, we realized that the only way to effectively handle the content that is specifically for industry professionals, which before was housed in many locations, was to create two sites—one for educating consumers, and one for assisting industry professionals.

Our organization is supported by our founding professional associations and 140+ member companies. However, in the past, our resources were freely available—anyone could access them—not just our members. The question became: Was that equitable to our stakeholders?

So we decided a “walled garden” was our solution, which is web lingo for creating a separate members-only site that was available through a registration process. Domani proposed creating a tiered authentication system that ultimately led to what you see on the site today for industry professionals at www.lifehappens.org/industry. We quickly recognized the many benefits that a system like this would allow, but the complications and change of scope required were staggering—essentially, we were now building two sites, both of which had different structures and navigation systems.

To cap off this experience, we’ve been steadily enhancing features on the site. It’ built in responsive design, which means the site display sproperly on any mobile device—now and into the future. Plus, we’ve added an interactive Life Ideas, as well as Life Lessons. And finally, we’ve been integrating our new logo (also created by Domani) and ancillary pieces that will help with the launch.

In short, it’s been a busy, busy year, but we’re extremely excited to be finally able to take the wraps off and hear what you think. Let us know in the comment sections, and thanks for your continued support!