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The Dorot Foundation
The Problem
While working at Sol Design Co, we were approached by the Dorot Foundation. The Dorot Foundation is a family foundation, rooted in the Jewish tradition of social justice, working towards a just and equitable society. They were looking for a complete website redesign as they felt their website at the time was outdated and no longer functional for their needs. With a new website The Dorot Foundation hoped to be able to shine a light on their focus areas, lift up the work of their grantees and fellows, and better represent who the Dorot Foundation holistically,
Evaluation of the Current Site
When assessing the original site, we found these issues:
The original website had little to no information about their grant programs, little to no information about the foundation itself, and the majority of the content was geared towards the Dorot Foundation's fellowship, which Dorot felt wasn't representative of who they are as a whole. The fellowship section itself was very bulky, cluttered and unorganized, which made it difficult to find important information.
In regards to design, there was very little imagery used throught the site and the imagery that was being used was blurry, the site was using a very dull color palate, there was minimal branding, and it generally had an outdated appearance.
Imagery and content across the site was several years old.
The Home page was a missed opportunity. There was very little content on the home page and the home page only include a image rotator, three buttons that matched the main navigation and two short sentences describing Dorot.
The navigation for the fellowship was cluttered and unorganized, and both the root and main navigation could be organized in a better way.
The website was also missing a footer.
Research and Discovery
To start this project, our team first had to learn about the Dorot Foundation - who they are, what they stand for, who is their audience. etc. This began the research and discovery phase of the project. During this phase we started with a kick off meeting where we met with the Dorot Foundation team and spent a long time asking them a series of questions about their history, their values, their wants/needs in a site, design inspiration, etc. We then did a deep dive into all of the Dorot Foundation's competitors (other foundations and other Jewish fellowship programs). We completed some additional research to learn more about how the Foundation is viewed publicly. We also reviewed all of their website's content and pulled all of the content into a content document to further review and organize later. Then our team identified Dorot's target audience, interviewed members of each audience (current and past grantees, current and past fellows, and staff members), and then created personas based off of those interviews. Once we had comepleted the research, we compiled all of the information we had found and presented it to the client. This information drove our actions througout the rest of the project.
Planning the Site
Once the research and discovery phase was over, we were ready to start building the sitemap and wireframes for the website, which were pieces of the project I was in charge of. Based on the content document we had built in the research and discovery phase of the project, I created a sitemap that reflected a better organization of content and layout of the site. I created an "About" section of the site, where content introducing the foundation could live along with the history of the foundation and the board/staff information. I condensed the content for the Dorot Fellowship and organized it a logical manner and I created a "Stories" section where Dorot could highlight grantee and fellow stories on its site. Besides the main content, I also reordered the root navigation and created a secondary navigation in the footer to house content like the terms and conditions, privacy policy, and contact page.
After completing the sitemap, I was able to move on to the wireframes. I built out seventeen pages of the Dorot site in the wireframe stage including the home page, about page, stories landing page and example story, the board/staff page, the grantmaking page, the fellowship landing page, and many more. The wireframes were created with not only the research and sitemap in mind, but with the idea of representing Dorot hollistically as well. You can see the thought process behind some of the bigger decisions in the wireframes below.
The site's content was consolidated onto 15 pages - (originally roughly 30 pages)
I made good use of the home page by adding an introductory blurb about the Dorot Foundation, content about each of the "pillars" of Dorot that take you to each of those sections of the website (grantmaking, the Dorot fellowship, and fellowship alumni), and adding a dynamic stories section to the bottom of the page to highlight grantee/fellow stories right when you enter the site.
The dynamic stories section was added to the bottom of almost every page, to really highlight it and make it accessible. A dynamic block including a gallery of images from the Dorot fellows was also added to the bottom of several pages for similar reasons.
The navigation was kept in the traditional style, but was reordered and organized in a logical manner to best represent the content of the site. The root naviation was also reordered.
A large expanded footer was created for the bottom of the site.
The stories section of the website was built to be very simple with a simple filter as Dorot will not have very many categories of posts and will not start out with very many stories.
The FAQ page under the Dorot fellowship was transformed into a series of accordions to condense the FAQ content and make it easier to read and scan.
Sitemap and Sample of Wireframes
Outcome
Once the sitemap and wireframe phase was signed off on, the wireframes we handed off to the design and development teams who created a completely redesigned website on wordpress. Several redesigns and changes came through during these two phases such as:
The grantmaking page was further developed and expanded into a landing page with four subpages to create a better and more transparent view of their grantmaking process and grantees.
A few of the pages under the "Dorot fellowship" were consolidated and renamed to better suit the new groupings of content.
The "About" pages were also consolidated from three pages to two due to lack of content.
In a request from the client, we added "in office, out of office" to the staff page as a fun addition to staff profiles.
After all of the redesigns and all of the content was loaded, our team launched the site. This launched website now was not only beautiful and modern visually, but also represented the Dorot Foundation in its entirety and allowed them to present their information in a more clear and transparent way. The site now functions smoothly for its audeince and is easy to navigate and find informaiton.
Before and After
