Allen O'Leary

A London based web designer, information architect and strategist
specialising in public sector and charity web projects

SPANA

Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad

The project

SPANA were frustrated by their web supplier who they felt were being unresponsive and were too expensive. They bought me on to do a couple of days a week to solve a number of their problems with their site, problems that only a good re-think and design and code could help with...

Issue 1: Re-imagining an ageing site...

The existing site was getting on, the whole approach dated, and the site was just not 'working hard enough' for the organisation.

I decided to go with a larger canvas, large clear text and images and 'distressed' transparency layering to capture the sense of the African desert and add visual sophistication.

We moved the site away from it's existing corporate look towards a media look, thus putting a lot of clear distance between it and it's direct competitors.

On the whole I sharpened the site, focussing it towards targeted fund-raising, trying to make every page count in the task of engaging people with SPANA's very worthy cause.

Issue 2: Incoming google traffic not being utilised

Despite very good traffic from Google traffic was landing at the home page and then running away again. I did a content plan for the new site that targeted content to the the google traffic, carefully shaping content for each specific audience. Now each page in the site is treated like a landing page, with a large engaging image, clear text and good alternative linking to get people drawn into through the site.

For instance we knew that lots of people would come in on 'Animal Cruelty' so we wrote a page that up SPANA's view on this, called 'Cruelty and Tradition'.

Additionally we added a search-friendly footer which contains a statement about SPANA's activities on every page. Longer more descriptive page titles and navigation links help both the visitor and Google.

Issue 3: Content written from an internal perspective

The site was organised in a way that excluded potential audiences by using language that made sense from the charities point of view but gave no 'in' for the visitor. For example income generating campaigns were listed under 'Fund raising'. This made sense for SPAPA - it's what they were doing - but how would a visitor know what that meant? Instead we changed this to 'You can help' which is an actionable offer.

We took a lot of care to make the language of the site active and actionable wherever possible - and wrote and repurposed many new pages, concentrating on three messages; 'SPANA in action' - a selection of recent activities and success stories; 'How we help' - a series emphasising the positive outcomes of SPANA activity and 'You can help'.

Issue 4: Not enough images

The existing site had few images, and they were too small. We capitalised on SPANA's excellent in-house photo library and put dozens more photos into the site.The inclusion of image galleries also helped here

For a cause like this the pictures really grab the heart - then the writing convinces the head.

Issue 5: Email campaigning

SPANA were heavily reliant on their print campaigns, but weren't capitalising on their website to gather email addresses.

By integrating Mail Chimp and putting a email capture form on every page email subs are now happening...

What they say...

"We are really pleased! Not only are people now finding information they are looking for but also are interested in wanting to help - I can feel it, the new structure is going to work wonders for the site and SPANA – well done!"
Katrin Kerber, SPANA

Gallery

These are screen shots of the live site - but please go and take a look...