The Aims
- Increase online usage
- Build a media archiving system
- Fully content managed
- Integrate social networking platforms
Champions of good design in the built environment, The Architecture Foundation felt they should be universally relevant, but website usage showed they weren't really engaging users from public or professional worlds. We were briefed to look into why and to help solve the problem.
We found, through a detailed audit and analysis of web statistics, that the site was poorly structured, hard to navigate, 'passive' and unengaging (so visitors didn't stay long, or come back), and missed the opportunity to clearly communicate the AF's proposition as champion of effective architecture and space planning. While AF has built up an archive of over 10 years of activity, the framework of the site wasn't designed to hold this amount of content, so much of their good work was inaccessible.
The Architecture Foundation is a highly active organisation and fundamentally the site needed to reflect their constant activity. The homepage is designed in a news format allowing AF to constantly change and update the content to encourage regular re-visits. The largest section of the site is the programme which when selected takes you into an user-friendly information plan of the current programme year. Each item is key coloured to represent an event type, and a brief summary is given. The site's content currently spans 14 years of AF's audio recordings and videos of lectures, talks and debates with seminal architects and figures within the built environment. This provides a massive resource for professionals, students and the general public to access, giving them clear reasons to visit again and again.
The Outcome
- A comparison between site usage just after lauch and six months later shows visitor numbers, on average, doubling month on month
- 31% of visitors come as referrals from other websites including the AF facebook site, New York Times, Tate Galleries and the AF email newsletters.
- AF's e-newsletters are currently achieving an average open rate of 35%.
