Blackstone Ranch Institute: Website
When I joined on with EMG one of my priorities was to improve the security of their websites. At the time many were running old versions of CMS software, none were utilizing HTTPS, and the server had not been updated in several years. While solving that last problem in September 2019 we realized our Blackstone Ranch Institute (BSRI) website, which had been built 10 years prior, would prevent us from making the necessary improvements due to it’s long-outdated and poorly supported CMS. So after running it past my boss, I reached out the stakeholder and proposed a new website built on WordPress and not too surprisingly, he was excited. Over the next several months, whenever I could make time between other projects, I would plug along the project and in February 2020 we were ready to go live.
While my earliest mocks for the project were focused on future projects and included an application workflow, the primary function of the BSRI website is to act as a library of past and present initiatives and partners the fund has invested in. So, my priorities pivoted to keeping that functionality simple and focused and the navigation and homepage we’re designed to do exactly that.
One of the very few challenges of the project came from porting over the initiatives from the old website, which included several custom fields that required logic to display correctly. For instance, while all interested had a start date, only some had end dates, and others only displayed the applicable season which all had to be replicated on the front-end and within the CMS. As the goal of the project was to encourage exploration of the library initiative included links to the partners and initiatives.
Some partners only have a single initiative but many have worked with BSRI on more than one project. To continue to encourage exploration, we included all of the initiative on the partner page along with their details.
Interests were also ported over from the old website, although their implementation was updated and functionality was improved to organize and display initiatives. In addition, because I used a custom taxonomy for implementation, WordPress treats them like categories, and we are able to apply multiple interests per initiative.
When I initially reviewed the existing website, I noticed some classic mistakes of early web design, one of which was a lack of organization when it came to sharing BSRIs purpose. So when it came to building the new website, the information was refined and organized into a single About page and 301 redirects were created to point to the corresponding sections.
Additional Thoughts
While this was a straightforward project with few challenges it was a pleasure to work on especially given its purpose. As with the old website, the stakeholder planned to administrate the website himself so once it was completed we had a couple of sessions to help him get acquainted with the new software. Ultimately he was very happy with the results and relayed compliments he had received from visitors since it’s launch in late February of 2020.