The Living Forest Website Face Lift

The New Website Versus The Old Website

By Sandy Drake - NNFP Website HELP Team Member

The Living Forest Site wasn’t a bad site; it was loose like a blanket that was starting to unravel. The colors and layout were visually pleasing but filled with a lot of empty space that needed to be tightened up. The user would have to search and scroll to get to the information, because of the empty space. It wasn’t easy to navigate to get to all of the important information that Living Forest had to offer.

First we created a template to make maintaining and updating the site easier. Living Forest Cooperative (like many wood organizations) doesn’t have large amounts of time to spend learning how to maintain a website. With the template they can learn more specific and less time consuming actions to update their site, without having to worry that they might damage to outer structure. The outer structure, the template, gives them the opportunity to create and update pages, while the structural part of the page remains locked. This prevents headache causing accidents that might put a site down for a couple of hours or a couple of days. In the future, as they become more familiar with their web development skills, they will be able to go in and adjust the template to the needs of the site.

We moved a new slideshow up to the top of the home page so that it was an immediate attraction visible as soon as the viewer opened the page.

What we did was tighten up that space, so that information was right there in front of the viewer as soon as they would open a page. We had one page filled with four pages worth of information that we would have to scroll through to get to one piece of information. We took that page and spilt it up into the four pages that they could be accessed by links to each page directly, instead of having scroll through the other pages to get to the page they were looking for. We reorganized other groups of pages so that they were accessible this way and hopefully easier to find.

We fixed outside links so that they produce a new browser window and viewer doesn’t have to leave the Living Forest Website in order to view the information from links.

We added more images to better illustrate some of the Living Forest activities, interests and practices. We went through and organized the root level of the site so that information and images were in organized folder and easier to locate when it came time to update a page or fix a problem on a page. We also renamed the web images. The new small descriptive image names in CamelCase and size, allow for easier recognition when updating and fixing problems. It also adds a little search engine optimization as well as information for “readers” used by handicapped individuals that can’t necessarily see the images.

We are now improving the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Title tags, Meta description, key words, alt tags and Google Analytics so that Google searches will reach the Living Forest Site.

It was also decided that with the face lift, colors and layout might be changed for a different look. The nice thing was with way the template was built it was fairly easy (40 min.) to adjust. We chose gray colors with a green tint and a differently organized table within the structure that might be more versatile as far as the information, images and all around look that LFC might like to represent through their website.