The BUILD website was initially built on a proprietary CMS. This meant that any significant site development work had to be taken to the original site builder, and any new web editor on BUILD staff had to learn the details of the CMS rather than bringing their knowledge from Wordpress or Drupal. The site was also outdated, and put together like a toddler's Christmas tree: pieces hanging off in odd places, nothing matching, nothing fitting together. Eventually, the website company went out of business, and there were only so many bandaids we could place on our sinking ship of a website. When the site was hacked for the fourth time in two months, we took the plunge to re-design.

 

We worked with a D.C. marketing agency to build the new website - a process that took roughly 18 months. While the agency handled all of the technical aspects of the site, the true challenge to the BUILD staff was to buckle down on messaging. The organization is staffed by content experts who have extremely high standards for this work - generally a good principal. However, the pressure to have everything perfectly defined and built meant that there were major aspects of BUILD's work that had never had any level of visibility.

 

The communications team worked with the content teams to develop an understanding of critical information and resources to include on the webpage. We developed point of view statements, brief summaries, and selected images that best represented the content areas (whether it focused on adult leaders, families, formal child care, etc.).