Westchester Land Trust
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Services Provided
Challenge
When The Westchester Land Trust approached Allora Media their website look and feel was out of date and inconsistent with their brand image. In addition, the site was edited with a desktop system making collaborative updates to the site difficult and the implementation of new functionality a major undertaking. They wanted to offer their visitors features like blogs, forums, podcasts, and create a more engaging user experience focusing on the library of amazing photos in their archives. Finally, making sure the new site was easily indexed and ranking in search engines like Google and Yahoo! was critical.
Our Solution
Our design phase focused heavily on making the site portray the beauty of the land the Trust seeks to preserve. We used their library of images and incorporated it into each page of the site, as well as using an earth tone pallete for the overall design. For managing their content, we chose to use Drupal The Trust now has the ability to create news items, blog postings, photo slideshows, and much more very quickly and easily. All of which they do without having to utilize desktop software. For others to edit the site, they simply need an account with correct permissions and a web browser. We also installed several modules that make the new site an extremely good platform for search engine optimization with clean, keyword rich page URLs and an XML sitemap to name a few.
Results
The results from this redesign have been excellent. Not only does the Land Trust site look more professional, they are able to dissiminate information to their constituents quickly and easily via their Drupal enabled site. Traffic from search engines has increased since the relaunch and now hundreds of pages are indexed. The WLT team finds the Drupal interface easy and enjoyable to use, making updates to the site something fun for them, rather than a chore. In 2011 we upgraded the site to Drupal 7 and the upgraded administrative interface has only enhanced their use of the site as a marketing tool.
