American Historical Association's Website Relaunch
Summary
In Fall 2013, I lead a complete website redesign of the American Historical Association's (AHA) main website. The redesign included a new look and feel, a robust content management system, a new taxonomy, clear new front-end navigation (primary and secondary), and new commenting functionality to better integrate conversation happening on the website and social media.
Approach
Prior to the launch, the AHA's website's more than 50,000 html pages were managed through a combination of Dreamweaver and a direct FTP folder structure. The information architecture from the front-end to back-end was out of date and did not support custom metatagging. In addition the site was not response, making it difficult for users to view the site on anything but a desktop.
The AHA is primarily a membership driven organization and their biggest event of the year is the annual meeting. The landing page for the annual meeting was difficult to scan and did not have a dynamic design to set it self apart against competing conferences.
The first and biggest step was identifying and building page templates for the websites array of content. Before, the site had no defined template and CMS users had to custom build each page in order to replicate a similar design. Once we defined templates and built a migration plan that organized the site's content into content types, we worked on updating the information architecture. This included re-labeling main navigation tabs and creating a utility navigation to cross-link their membership login and AHA Today blog. Our new CMS platform was Ingeniux and I oversaw the migration of 50,000 pieces of content into the new information architecture structure, including setting up a redirect strategy for content that experienced a URL change.
User Testing
In January 2013 I conducted on-site user testing interviews during our annual meeting using a prototype of the new navigation and homepage. Using the feedback I received directly from our members (and resulting mass emailer solicitation after the conference) to make alterations to the design and navigation.
Results