In 2015, The Environmental Council of States (ECOS) had a website over a decade old, littered with broken links and inaccessible content for its members. We worked with the organization to create a flexible user experience on a WordPress website that would be able to sustain them for another 10 years.
Alexandra Dunn
ECOS Executive Director, 2013-2017Services provided
- Content Strategy
- User Experience Strategy
- Web Design
- WordPress Development
Strategy was the fertilizer for our ideas
We always start our projects with strategy sessions, which aim to give everyone — us and the client’s team — a shared understanding of what the website’s purpose should be. Thanks to the ECOS team, we recognized that their website needed to be less of a marketing device and should be a tool that celebrates and supports members’ efforts.
With members — made up of the leadership of state and territory environmental agencies — across all 50 states and numerous territories, we were constantly reminded of the diverse environmental needs across the US.
This meant getting to the bottom of what content needed to migrate to the replatformed site and letting member needs lead our reorganization effort and visual design choices. As the site has continued to evolve, a sense of familiarity with the content helps ECOS members effectively find what they need. This means we don’t have to rethink successful decisions of the past. We can just continue to improve them over time.
Leveraging FacetWP
With all of that content, the priority was making key policy documents organized and easy to find.
Thanks to FacetWP, a faceted search plugin from developer Matt Gibbs, we were able to provide multiple pathways to content that enabled a true “hub and spoke” experience for ECOS members. We’ve continued to improve findability by utilizing SearchWP to tailor search results.
Growing a long term partnership
Long term partnerships are always the goal we have when taking on website design and development projects. Websites can’t be launched once and then ignored, because old problems may show up again. For nearly 10 years, ECOS and Rocketkoi have worked together to build up from the foundation we originally set so that ECOS can improve the capability of state environmental agencies to protect and improve human health and the environment.
Working directly with a client with such an important mission is why we started Rocketkoi. We look forward to helping ECOS and their members for another 10 years.
