Reconstruction of the House

We finally arrived at the end of a long but very interesting process total and complete overhaul of our website. And as I tried to boil down last year in a blog post, I hope you find the following process, and get a sense of thinking that led this process.

This began almost exactly a year ago, when we sat down as a team and asked a simple question, what are the most important things of our new website should do? The criteria that we have created not only guided the selection process, but a Web site you see today. They were as follows :.

1. Having a way to effectively browse the content for both the consumer and the industry professional Due to technical limitations inherent in our old site, professionals in the industry had only a small icon in the upper right corner to access the wealth of resources that lie ahead. Which leads me to # 2 ...
2. Substantially revise the structure and site navigation to facilitate content discovery. Our old site had so many navigational elements and sub-navigation and even sub-navigation that it was often very difficult to find what you are looking for.
3. Build social media in our site a real and integrated manner. When we began the redesign process, we had almost 125,000 fans on Facebook (today we are more than 0,000), but there was zero tie-in to that on our website.
4. Integrating our blog on the site, and try to build a model "newsroom" of creating content continuously. Our blog were hundreds of articles written over several years. And yet, it was very difficult or impossible to find the blog to any real extent. He stayed on the outskirts, even if it was the rich content of our site.
5. Create a new video section of our website, where videos could be discovered and viewed easily. We are an organization of narration, and videos are among our most powerful assets. Yet more often than not, we led people to our YouTube channel because of the limits to discover the videos on our website and watch.
6. Designing the new site so as to capitalize on mobile traffic. at this stage last year, mobile (both tablets and phones) accounted for almost 20% of our traffic, and we knew it would only increase.

Once we had listed these goals, developing a "request for proposal" that we could send design companies to find the best solution was a simple process. From a field of about 15 companies, we selected Domani Studios, Brooklyn, NY, a decision that will prove very fortuitous, as they have been amazing partners in this process.

Content is King

We knew we needed to take a comprehensive look at our content engine that we use to inform and educate consumers. He had accumulated over the years, and was now so large that many sections have been re-written from the ground.

Once we had finalized drawings, we were finally able to interact with the content on the test site as a consumer would. It was exciting to see the new content planned in clean designs. However, we saw that we could greatly improve the user experience.

Our old site was like the proverbial information the shopping center was everywhere, but it should fall over. With this new website, we decided to help consumers through the stages of both understanding why they needed insurance coverage, then how to get . This step by step process looks like this:

1. Understanding if they have a need
2. If so, find out how much the insurance coverage they need, using a our new redesigned insurance calculators
3. Next, know what types of options they have to help cover their needs
4. and finally, how can they buy or get coverage -it could be through the workplace, an agent (using our completely revamped agent Locator), or selecting a company or an online option

a new world for industry professionals

and it wasn 't even the biggest change to our content. As we started to work through the information architecture (IA) stage, we realized that the only way to effectively manage content that is specifically for professionals in the industry, which was housed in you many places, was to create two -site for a consumer education, and the other to help industry professionals.

our organization is supported by our founder 140+ professional associations and member companies. However, in the past, our resources were freely available to everyone could not access the our members only. The question became: Was it fair to our stakeholders

So we decided a "walled garden" was our solution, which is web lingo to create a separate site for members that was available by through a registration process ?. Domani has proposed the creation of an authentication system at several levels that ultimately led to what you see today on the site for industry professionals to www.lifehappens.org/industry. We quickly recognized the many benefits that such a system would allow, but complications and change required perimeter was amazing, essentially, we are building two sites, both of which have structures and navigation systems.

To top this experience, we regularly improve functionality on the site. It is built in a responsive design, meaning the site sproperly display on a mobile device, now and in the future. In addition, we added an interactive ideas of life, and life lessons. And finally, we are integrating our new logo (also created by Domani) parts and accessories that will help with the launch.

In short, there has been a busy, busy year, but we are very happy to finally be able to take the wraps and to hear what you think. Let us know in the comments sections, and thank you for your continued support!