Web Redesign: americanprogress.org

Design Challenge: A four-year-old web site, packed with thousands of pages of content, hundreds of reports, countless press releases, biographies, memos, videos, and other random piece of content, needed a more modern, useful design. Visitors complained that they had a hard time finding what they were looking for. Other users visited the site and didn’t understand what it was. Meanwhile, the organization felt the old web site just didn’t present the scope and impact of their organization.

Solution: To start, we tried to design a masthead that incorporated design elements of the Center for American Progress logo (the flag’s “swooshes”) without showing the logo in full, to convey the idea that the site, like the organization, had evolved and grown. Secondly, we re-organized the home page content so that it was clearer to users where to find different types of features. It also made clear what the organization’s key priorities were and how to find out more. Third, we introduced a multi-header feature spot at the top of the home page, which allowed greater flexibility to promote new stories and special projects. We used a similar approach lower down on the home page to organize projects into a scrolling slider, that allowed us to showcase a range of of reports, events, and activities sponsored by the center. Finally, we de-cluttered a lot of the sidebar content, eliminating a lot of the random art, logos, and styles that made the earlier version of the side confusing and disjointed to visitors.

On content pages, we reworked the layout of stories and features to make them more reader-friendly, with more compelling and prominent photography, larger typography, and social networking tools. We also used the sidebar to feature related posts and articles from the same author. We created special CSS and tools to ensure that when users printed articles, they would print cleanly.

We also revamped sections of the site to showcase CAP’s growing collections of reports, videos, and multimedia features. Similarly, we made the press areas cleaner, simpler, and easier to sort. We also redesigned the biopraphies section to better present information about our staff and fellows, with room to spotlight publications they wrote.