Web Design
Challenge
The non-profit Southeast Dairy Association is funded by dairy farmers to build awareness of the benefits of milk, cheese and yogurt. To do this, the association offers a vast array of resources, from recipes and research to curriculum and videos. It needed a website that better organized the massive amount of information offered, in addition to providing better control of the site through an open source content management system. Specific objectives included:
• Add engaging content to increase visitors 20 percent.
• Decrease new content upload time by 75 percent.
• Improve SEO with at least a 10 percent increase in referral and organic search traffic.
Solution
c21 reorganized the website’s content into more concise sections, grouping the information by theme instead of the previous organization by target audience. For example, before the redesign, health benefits of dairy could be found in the Dairy Lovers (consumers), Health and Media sections, but now is grouped into one Health and Wellness section. Once the navigation and content were set, we managed the programming of a WordPress site that gave the Southeast Dairy Association full content control – from the ability to simply add new recipes and news articles to creating entire new pages and navigation items. In addition, the new site featured:
• Horizontal navigation to maximize featured content
• A cleaner layout and revolving features on the home page to increase engagement
• After redesignHTML pages for resources that were previously PDFs to improve SEO
Results
Due to the improved content and better design, the website received a tremendous spike in visits. Total visits increased 45 percent, referral traffic increased 25 percent, and visits resulting from organic searches rose 16 percent. The new site is much easier to manage than the previous site, allowing the Southeast Dairy Association control over every page. Content upload time has been reduced from a three-day turnaround to mere hours, even minutes for basic changes.