Website Redesign
The JMT Wilderness Conservancy
When tackling the redesign of the JMT Wilderness Conservancy’s website, my goals were to improve the aesthetics, visual consistency, and user experience. Over the span of a few years with numerous employees trying to manage the website, it had become disorganized and inconsistent. Users were struggling to find the information they were looking for, and much of the website was outdated.
I rewrote the majority of the copy for clarity and accuracy, standardized design elements and messaging, and created additional resources to increase site traffic.
Significant tasks included:
Overhauling the navigation structure; adding and removing pages as necessary for a more intuitive flow of information.
Instating a blog feed and designing multiple templates so that text and photos for future posts could easily be inserted and published.
Creating a “Hiking the JMT” resource page which included writing all of the copy and implementing an engaging, user-friendly structure.
At the onset of the website project, my biggest observation was that the Conservancy was missing a prime opportunity to be an actual resource for people hiking the JMT. While the nonprofit had traction among some large donors and funding foundations, it was struggling to reach its “grassroots” donor group - the average hiker and wilderness lover! I also saw that the site traffic was almost exclusively first-time visitors with nearly no return visits, and the average length of a visit was under one minute.
To improve all of these stats, I proposed a comprehensive “Hiking the JMT” resource. Having hiked the full trail myself and as a true lover of the High Sierra, I felt strongly that this resource needed to exist just for its own sake. The more knowledge people have about how to move through these wilderness spaces, the more they will value and take care of them. The Conservancy’s restoration work focuses on undoing impact in fragile alpine environments. Providing education before people venture into those places will always be more sustainable and cost-effective than trying to fix the impact later.
After this page of the website went up, site traffic quadrupled during the first month and people were visiting the site more than once and staying longer each time. The newsletter that introduced the page was the most opened email the Conservancy had ever sent and had 40 times more click-throughs to the website than normal.
Hiking the JMT:
As you scroll past the header, a sub-menu appears. Under every header is a list of expandable topics, each containing a summary and external links to more resources. This improves SEO and naturally directs site users to other important authorities such as the National Park Service, National Forest Services, and Pacific Crest Trail Association.
Click the video below for an overview of the functionality of the page.
The live version of the web page can be found here: Hiking the JMT
An archived version with the original text can be found here: Archived Hiking the JMT
Newsfeed:
The Conservancy uses an email marketing platform to send newsletters and updates to thousands of subscribers and donors. However, there was no archive, so after an email had been sent out, that information was not accessible anywhere. I solved this by creating a blog on the website, translating all of their old marketing emails into blog posts, and creating templates so they can continue to update their “Newsfeed” and keep valuable information easy to access.
Featured here are the Newsfeed home page I created and an example blog post. I designed multiple templates so that future posts could be easily and cohesively added to the site.
In conjunction with the creation of the blog, I also streamlined all of their social media postings with a coordinated outreach via email, Instagram, Facebook, and their website each month. All platforms are now visually cohesive.
Interactive Elements:
The final component to tackle was simply making the website a bit more interesting and fun to move through. Previously, it was text-heavy with very long pages displaying all the information at once. This was difficult to navigate through and the hierarchy of information was confusing. I created solutions on various pages to compress information while still keeping it all accessible.
One example here shows the click-through buttons for the currently funded projects that I updated to be a sliding menu instead of a long, vertical list that took up much of the page.
The other example shows the “pillars” that guide the Conservancy’s mission. I rewrote this copy to be more concise but it’s fairly long by nature. This interactive element keeps the text from being overwhelming and lets the user move through the information at their own pace.