The challenge:
Timbercon came to Gate6 for a website redesign. Their site was over 10 years old and was experiencing a loss of traffic due to poor user experience and loss of ranking due to the broken site architecture and lack of crawlability. Timbercon was also looking to position itself to successfully implement the next phase of its website and enter into e-commerce for its 6,040 products. Additionally, the company had evolved and the stakeholders did not feel it represented their current impact in the industry and their position in the community.
My role:
I was the Strategist, Creative Director, and Product Owner for the project. I started with user research, building personas, a market and competitive analysis, and requirements gathering from all stakeholders to set the stage for the project.
Due to the volume of work to complete the redesign in 6 months, I had to find a way to break up the work into manageable chunks. In the spirit of agile development, we started with the biggest piece, the products section. https://www.timbercon.com/products/
The product section posed the biggest UX challenge because the navigation goes 4 layers deep and the content structure varied. The previous navigation and site architecture (folder structure) hid most of the products and product categories which was counterintuitive to business goals. To meet future business goals, scope, and timeline we utilized WooCommerce to import all products into the database so we could easily structure and categorize product data in a way that was crawlable to search engines and easy for users to find. Next, I partnered with the designer and developers to design and build the UX/UI following UX best practices and the new SEO-friendly site architecture for the products section.
WooCommerce was also utilized for the 2nd biggest piece of the project which is the glossary terms. https://www.timbercon.com/resources/glossary/
Timbercon is very involved in the Portland tech scene and prides itself on being a knowledge base for its industry. There are 4,000+ industry glossary terms that students and industry professionals consistently use. Once we cleaned up the data to remove duplicates and correct folder structure, we added the glossary terms to the database, organized and built for easy user search.
Once the products and glossary terms were complete we focused on the rest of the website while doing QA the whole time (build, test, release). All content and imagery were updated to reflect search-optimized messaging that resonates with the current state of the brand, their industry impact and accomplishments as well as what is most important to their users.
The result:
We entered into the agreement utilizing the iron agile triangle with the understanding that the timeline was fixed, and cost and features were variable. As we got deeper into the project, I was able to up-sell an additional 27% of the budget and 2 additional months based on functionality/scope requests and the volume of work to fulfill requests.
The 11,000+ URL website was completed in 8 months. Stakeholder and user feedback was positive and organic site traffic has increased on average 18.2% month over month since launch. Now the database, site architecture, and product table are positioned to move into e-commerce for phase 2 (add pricing to WooCommerce with merchant integration).
Learn how I solved complex UX challenges for a portfolio of residential communities under one brand experience to support a rebrand for Steadfast Living.