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The Findings Group, LLC.
The Problem
The Findings Group is a research and evaluation firm located in Decatur, GA, that provides research and evaluation services to K-12 and post-secondary public education organizations and programs focused on promoting accessible and inclusive STEM education to minority groups. I was brought on The Findings Group team in April of 2023 to give their website a refresh. Their website had not been updated, besides a few small content updates, since the creation of the company in 2008. The Findings Group wanted to bring new life to their site as the orignal website was outdated, disorganized, almost entirely white, and had no imagery.
Assessing the Situation
I sat down with the client to assess the needs of the website.
The website's design was bland and outdated - missing color, imagery, and branding (besides the company's logo at the top of the home page).
The content was disorganized and presented in a clunky, hard to read manner. There was little division between sections, allowing content to almost run together.
The navigation was cluttered and had duplicate pages.
The website was also missing a footer.
Planning the Site
The website was originally built on wordpress, so I began by logging into the backend and evaluating the site. I then pulled all of the content out of the site and into a word document in order to best determine where content should be placed, how to consolidate the content and how to best organize/consolidate the pages of the site. The content document allowed me to easily plan and place the content in the optimal location on the site and determine which and how many pages were necessary.
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I also spoke with members of the team in order to determine what they thought their website should look like, what they would need in a site, who their audience would be, and what their audience might want in a site. From this discussion, I ws able to learn that, in the past, The Findings Group had gained clients predominantly from word of mouth. Therefore in a website refresh, they were hoping to create an appealing wesbite that attracted clients through not only its design, but its content offerings as well. The Findings Group was also hoping to better represent who they are and what they do through new and better organized content.
Building and Launching the Site
Once I had determined my design and content direction for the site and had completed my research, I began building the site on wordpress.
The site's content was consolidated onto 6 pages - (originally nine pages)
"Aside" was relabeled as "Blog" to better represent its content and make it easier to understand by the site's users.
"Recent Research" was relabeled as "Our Research" and was transformed from a page into a new post type - Portfolio. All research from the company's history was then loaded onto the site in date order, so that the research done by The Findings Group was easily able to be found all in one place.
Content was updated across the site to reflect the current state of the company - including updating the team and their information, the contact information, and the About Us content.
Each page was layed out in a organized, structured manner so that everything is easy to read and so that the content is no longer running into itself.
The Homepage was redesigned to reflect a more holistic view of The Findings Group - adding the Atlanta skyline to the top of the page to reflect the company's roots, a blurb introducing the company, and dynamic section that pulls in the most recent research posts to the bottom of the page,
The navigation was modernized and placed in the upper right corner - transforming it from a traditional form of navigation to a hamburger style navigation. The logo was added into the upper left corner and was linked as a "Home" button for the site to make it easy to return to the home page from anywhere on the site. The company's full name and tagline was also added the the right of the logo for extra branding.
A footer was created - making The Findings Group's contact information easy to find on the bottom of every page.
In regards to site design, due to this being a smaller project, we started with choosing and customing a new theme on wordpress. Once a theme had been chosen, I looked at a few different color options and we landed on light grey from TFG's color pallet, giving the site some much needed color. Besides the main grey color, I also tried to inlcude as many pops of Findings Group green as possible to add to their site branding.
Once I made all of the updates to the content and design for website, I launched the updated and refreshed Findings Group website. I am currently still working with the team to get more updated content to continute to optimze the site. Since the launch of the new site in April 2023, there was a 156% increase in site views and a 142% increase in site visitors in the period from April to August 2023, compared to April to August 2022.
Before and After
