Business Council of New York State
Website Redesign — Site audit, information architecture, website layout
Client: Business Council of New York State (BCNYS) | Company: Upside Collective
The Business Council of New York State (BCNYS) came to us with an aging website that was becoming laden with an excessive number of pages containing outdated information, and overall lacked any sense of categorization or navigational structure. We delivered a new Drupal 8 website with a complete restructuring of their information architecture and a new design system that has resulted in near autonomy to maintain this website within their own team.
Initial mid-fi Sketch wireframes
To begin the project I performed a site audit to establish a baseline for the new site. Research including a deep dive into the analytics, existing Drupal page types, and a brief user study was concluded. We found the site to contain thousands of memos dating back a handful of years, along with news items and PDFs that were all clogging up the site in both the frontend and the back. Organization was the name of the game for this redesign.
Initial Site Architecture work - existing structure written on tabloid newsprint, marked and labeled for reorganization
Hi-fi tablet navigation animated prototype
It was important my team create a taxonomy for these PDFs, memos, and news items so they could be categorized, tagged, archived, and filtered appropriately. This also meant creating a more robust and structured information architecture to reflect the habits of the users that were discovered in the initial audit and user research phase.
Homepage mockup laptop & mobile
The Business Council is made up of a collection of divisions, all responsible for various services provided by the agency. Thus, each division would utilize their section of the website differently. I made sure to work closely with each major division to ensure the overall website fit their needs as well as their individual page types. This included many trainings with the development team, myself, and the client to generate autonomy with their new Drupal backend once the site was complete.
Additionally, I developed a complete visual design system for their website with elements that could be handed off to their on-staff graphic designer to use across other collateral to maintain brand consistency.
Web Content Style Guidelines excerpt
Web Content Style Guidelines excerpt
Homepage, Yearly Budget Overview page, Insurance, Customer Service page
Upside Collective are members of The Business Council and could not have been easier to work with or more professional throughout the months-long process. Designing a website, and dealing with particular clients with varied interests, tastes and goals is never easy. If any of you are in the market for website work, we could not recommend Upside Collective enough.
— Zack Hutchins, Director of Communications