The ChIPs Network is a nonprofit with the goal of connecting women in the areas of technology, law and policy – and by doing so, supporting their advancement in these fields. Having put up with a website that made it difficult for them to manage their content, to provide information to their members and that looked outdated, ChIPs contacted Waqa Studios for help.
Website Strategy.
With a focus on identifying the different types of website visitors and their needs, Waqa Studios developed a strategy to direct visitors to the most relevant sections of the new website. Designed and structured with a focus on results, existing members, newly joining members and those interested in attending ChIPs events are now all able to quickly find the information they need.
With lots of different content it can be tricky to present it all clearly and concisely. To tackle this problem a great number of flexible components and templates for displaying content were created. This provided a solution; no content was delivered in a structure or style that didn’t fit, felt inappropriate or made it difficult to consume. Instead, each page was designed around the content that needed to be presented.
Ease of Maintenance.
Waqa Studios was keen to help ChIPs gain the ability to manage their website content. The old website was buggy and needed to be completely replaced. Managing and editing content was previously not very easy and there was no way to add content that made pages and content look visually appealing. Use of WordPress page builders (drop and drag design tools) in an attempt to solve this dragged down the website further, making it slow, unwieldy and adding the the number of errors.
To fix this we designed a new WordPress website around a set of specifically defined custom content blocks. Each had a different way of displaying text and images on the page, keeping within the bounds of ChIPs branding, that solved a specific issues with that specific type of content.
Content blocks are able to be moved into place allowing any team member to create new page content in an appealing way, without the complexity issues of page builders that can lead website contributors towards creating off-brand inconsistent designs.
We’ve branded recent ChIPs events such as the 2018 Global Summit and the Next Gen Summit.
This branding was used on event websites, on printed media as well as on-stage.
Results.
We restored the client’s faith in the WordPress platform by showing them that when used correctly it can be both powerful and stable, as well as have complex custom page templates and still be easy to maintain on the back end.
ChIPs has a modern website that they’re able to finally edit themselves, with components that allow for flexible page designs that stay consistent with their brand.
Our organization had outgrown our existing website, which was clunky and stale. To put it politely it was in desperate need of an overhaul.
As a rapidly growing non-profit, the number one priority for our website was scalability. Our team is very small, so the ability to update our site with the least amount of effort was a must. Almost equally important was the need to create an improved user experience.
A perfect mix of approachable designers and developers, the Waqa Studios’ team understood our needs and translated them into a beautifully designed website. We are thrilled to have a website that represents who we are as an organization and is now proudly shared with our members. Working with Waqa Studios was a pleasure and we would not hesitate to recommend them for website design and development.
Karen RoyerExecutive Director, ChIPs
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