Branding
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
Copywriting
Client: It Gets Better
I’ve had the pleasure of working on plenty of website redesigns, but when It Gets Better came to us to revitalize their brand, dropping “Project” from their name and updating their website and the over five thousand pages that went with it, I couldn’t open a spreadsheet to start cataloging everything fast enough.
Here was our jumping off point. It was a site, like many nonprofits, that was trying to be everything to all audiences. But their goal was to create rabbit holes of information for LGBTQ+ youth to help them discover themselves, and embrace the journey.
With their youth-focused audience in mind - we crawled their site, found all 5,000+ pages, and started cutting. From the 5,000, we trimmed to approximately 1,000 pieces of content, videos, and blogs that we tagged with categories and tags to help create our own algorithm.
We added fresh movement through graphic elements and used images featuring joyful queer youth to set the tone that this was a safe space for youth to explore (along with a handy safe exit).
The menu was refreshed to only focus on what kids would be interested - leaving the rest of the marketing pages that organizations or adults would find interesting tucked away.
As the content lead on the team, the tagging was my pride and joy. We landed on roughly 20 categories and 50 tags to help youth find the content they needed. We also had to consider that the vocabulary around LGBTQ+ community is always evolving, and we wanted to highlight that aspect of youth/queer culture (and keep the site fluid, evolving with the times to feel current).
