Case Study: Mobile Responsive and Search Engine Friendly Site Design

CASE STUDY

New Website Development For Local Volunteer Group

1.65

Site Load Speed in Seconds (Pingdom)

35.56%

3-Month Avg. Bounce Rate

7

Key Stakeholders

Stakeholders were ecstatic with the launch of their redesigned website to serve the community.

The Client

The ‘Volunteer Markham’ website was created for Information Markham and Volunteer Centre (IMVC), a non-profit, charitable organization serving Markham by connecting people to volunteer opportunities in the community and vice versa connecting organizations to people looking to volunteer their time. Currently Volunteer Markham resides and operates inside of the Markham City Hall (Markham Civic Centre).

The Challenge

Volunteer Markham had two websites (InformationMarkham.ca and VolunteerMarkham.ca) both of which were long out of date, difficult to manage, not very user-friendly to navigate, and wasn’t usable on mobile. The goal for redesigning the website was to better serve volunteers and organizations looking for volunteers, giving them intuitive ways to find information, and make life easier for staff to post and manage local news and community events.

Through Volunteer Markham’s vetting process, the MRCK marketing team was granted the website project to redesign and develop a modern and robust website that combines information from both InformationMarkham.ca and VolunteerMarkham.ca. The team was also tasked to incorporate an online third-party volunteer search provider as it was being used by a few municipal volunteer groups.

Our Approach

MRCK marketing met with key stakeholders at the kick-off meeting to understand their needs and wants for their new site. Our focus for this web redesign project was all about the user experience and developing an information architecture to support their redesign goals. The site needed quick, clear paths to Volunteer Markham services and community news, fast page load speed, mobile responsive, and an easy way to make donations.

To ensure a true partnership and collaboration, our team prototyped a low-fidelity (grey-scale) wireframe to showcase what we had envisioned for the new site — clean and professional. In this stage we gathered feedback from key stakeholders for revisions. The overall site look and feel follows the Volunteer Markham’s colour palette of navy blue and green, combined with a less cluttered experience.

Next step, the key stakeholders reviewed the high-fidelity wireframe where it closest resembled the final design in terms of details for approval. Another step for our team was to gather feedback for adjustments before the website development.

We developed the newly designed Volunteer Markham’s website and implemented a fully responsive solution backed by WordPress CMS. To top it off, both key stakeholders and our team conducted rigorous tests on the website to ensure it passed the MRCK marketing quality standards prior to handing it off to the Volunteer Markham team. Our multi-stage approval process is how we ensure a top quality website while keeping all parties up to date with the progress.

The Results

Stakeholders were ecstatic with the launch of their redesigned website to serve the community. Not only did we manage to achieve a site load speed of 1.86 seconds (Pingdom, Washington server), we also had created a website which had an average bounce rate of 35.56% the following 3 months after the site launch.

This was one website development project which MRCK marketing enjoyed being apart of.

CLIENT TESTIMONIAL

“MRCK worked with Volunteer Markham to rebuild our webpage. The team at MRCK was highly skilled, very patient and helped us understand how to position ourselves in the marketplace. We are extremely pleased with our new webpage and friends at MRCK!”

– Mirja Raita

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