Content Strategy - Capital Area Humane Society

I was part of a two-woman team that created a content strategy for the Capital Area Humane Society (CAHS) in Lansing, Michigan. The comprehensive strategy addressed issues of branding, search engine optimization, and workflow.

The first step in the process was interviewing our stakeholder to get a better idea of the organization’s content practices and discuss any qualms about its website. We took copious notes throughout this stage to ensure that we addressed all of our stakeholder’s concerns.

After the interview, we took to the drawing board. We identified the organization’s business goals and how they intersected with its users’ needs. From there, my partner and I worked on a style guide to help CAHS create a consistent brand image. The colors and fonts represented were chosen based on the look and feel that was desired for the new website and were incorporated into our designs. Also included are suggestions on voice and tone, editorial style, and even types of photographs that they should use. We made up a campaign to show them an example of what these suggestions would look like in practice.

We also created wireframes of the new site before my partner developed more in-depth mockups. One of our stakeholder’s main concerns was that the website wasn’t adaptive, so we created three views on different devices to show how our design was reactive to different screen sizes.

We addressed things that CAHS could do with metadata in accordance with Search Engine Optimization practices to improve their chances of being found through search engines. Finally, I designed a governance plan that CAHS could use to help improve workflow and get the whole team involved in content creation and curation. The graphic that accompanied the explanation of the suggested plan is shown here.

Once the content strategy was completed, I delivered a pitch to our stakeholder to explain the decisions behind the product and discuss the results. 

To see the Capital Area Humane Society’s new website, click here: http://cahs-lansing.org/.