“Because it touches just about everyone inside and outside the organization – members, students, donors, the greater community, potential employees - it's probably the one communications vehicle that represents CCA so broadly, which is why it was so crucial for CCA to make these changes.”
Pamela Lafayette, Program Coordinator
Client:
The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) supports the production of art, interdisciplinary creativity, and the synthesis between the University, Ithaca, and global locations. CCA is a conduit for this effort in the creative disciplines, including but not limited to visual arts, performing arts, creative writing and spatial, geographical aesthetics such as architecture and the landscape.
Challenge:
CCA required a new website design as part of a comprehensive strategy to improve their ability to promote arts events, grants, communicate with members, and showcase its art through clips and images of projects.
The previous website was slow to load, making exploration of the works of art tedious and frustrating. The navigation structure was caused confusion for its visitors, so information that should be quickly accessible was difficult to locate. For example, the previous site’s event listing format did not allow linking to websites within the project descriptions. It also restricted the CCA team regarding their ability to keep the content fresh—an important factor in SEO Rankings.
Solution:
Site Architecture & Navigation:
Site visitors looking for information on events, exhibitions, or contact information needed a direct route to the correct page, without getting caught up in a streaming FLASH piece. The new site serves various forms of multimedia – quality images, audio, video, etc. – quickly-- so the visitors can enjoy the art rather than get caught up in waiting for the video or image to download.
LForm developed a multi-level navigation and a site-wide search engine so all visitors can find information in a way that makes sense to them. Events by date are featured prominently on the homepage; images open quickly in a separate image window, ensuring that visitors will not lose their place within the site.
Content:
LForm organized the new site to be visually compelling, audience-driven, and highly interactive. The online gallery is more visually appealing, scales gracefully to include work from students, faculty, alumni, and various college exhibitions. It now allows for the inclusion of images with a wide range of aspect ratios—a limitation of the previous site. LForm constructed the site upon a flexible, proprietary content management system (CMS), which enables museum staff to easily manage the abundance of multimedia art work and update the site with art event information, promotions, and exhibitions.
Results:
Members report that they are thrilled they don't have to guess where something might be within the site by poking around...it's all plainly listed. They now comfortably navigate the site through uncomplicated drop down menus, the search option, and the sidebar menu that shows all the areas of the program clearly.
The CCA team can now load many more images, video, and audio clips so now viewers may get a glimpse of an event to help decide if they will attend. The site can now feature works from current and past projects because they can load without slowing down the viewing experience. In fact, the CCA team is building image galleries for their major projects from 2006 for archival purposes – something they would never have attempted with the old website.
“Since we didn't know what new technology was available in design to make the site clearer and easier to move around in, we relied on Ian to guide us to the right solutions to solve our current challenges and take us into the future. He was a terrific partner.”
Pamela Lafayette, Program Coordinator
