Aspire of Illinois »
Founded in 1960, Aspire of Illinois is a leader in services for children and adults with developmental disabilities and their families. In their 48 years of service to Chicago’s western suburbs, Aspire has come to be recognized as a valuable and comprehensive resource for developmentally disabled individuals of all ages. Accessible, interactive and community-oriented, Aspire’s website represents the strength of their mission and purpose.
Goals
The goals for developing this site included:
- Remodeling the website’s look and feel to more thoroughly represent the organization’s constituents, resources and mission.
- Creating a more streamlined, easily accessible information portal.
- Leveraging the website to become a stronger fundraising and volunteer recruitment tool.
- Increase search engine visibility and subsequent website traffic.
Results
Separating Aspire’s content into manageable sections was the first step in creating a website that would become not only a source of community information, but a call to action. With these ideas in mind, Duo created a design and structure from the following components:
- Rebranding: Images of Aspire’s clients, success stories and interactive content helped reinforce the website as an extension of the organization’s identity.
“Volunteer” and “Donate” buttons on each page provided an online gateway through which visitors could become involved.
- Information Architecture: Through intuitive content organization and link distribution, visitors were able to quickly find what they were looking for and easily explore related areas of interest.
- Web Analytics: Duo worked with Jim Kale, Aspire’s executive director, to enhance existing content. Part of this strategy included emphasizing their location throughout the site, in order to draw users searching specifically by geographic area.
During the initial kickoff meeting, Duo’s three person team worked with Aspire to detail the nature and scope of the project. This was followed by fine-tuning Aspire’s chosen design, and training in content editing as well as analyzing traffic through Google Analytics. Since the redesign, Aspire has seen a marked increase in donations, volunteering and program enrollment.
This site was built using Contribute, an Adobe web content management system that enables content authors to quickly and easily update existing websites while maintaining site integrity. Content authors and contributors can edit or update any website without having to learn HTML.
