National Women's Health Resource Center
NWHRC (www.healthywomen.org) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide the public with up-to-date, medically-accurate information about women's health. In addition to the thousands of pages of free health information available online, NWHRC offers a clearinghouse of printed and downloadable publications, listings of books, clinic locations, and more.
Website Redesign and Search Engine Optimization
NWHRC came to Foraker Design looking for a redesigned site that was more usable and attractive to the hundreds of thousands of women who browse its pages each year looking for authoritative and trustworthy health information. In order to reach the widest audience possible, the site also had to be built for high performance in the search engines. Having spoken with some existing redesign clients, the organization felt that Foraker's holistic approach was a good fit for addressing what they suspected were numerous issues responsible for the site's flat traffic.
Indeed, in Foraker's initial analysis of the site, we discovered many impediments to thorough indexing by search engine robots, and debilitating errors or omissions on the pages that were being indexed. These included extensive areas of out-of-date or erroneous HTML within the page templates, a link structure that was uncrawlable by search engine robots, and poor agreement between META tags, page TITLEs, and page text. Many of these issues were addressed in the redesign, and additional work continues in an effort to get the site properly indexed and ranked—so that women can find NWHRC's vast store of health information using the web's most popular search engines.
Foraker worked hand-in-hand with NWHRC staff to arrive at a design that was attractive to search engine robots and users alike, easy to navigate, and conveyed the knowledge and trust so important to the organization's mission.
It is clear that the changes have paid off. Following re-launch in mid-February of 2005, March traffic surged more than 50% over January's traffic. This growth trend has continued in each succeeding month, with the site currently experiencing traffic levels more than 300% higher than those prior to re-launch.
Content Management System Integration
In addition to designing the new look and feel, Foraker implemented the new design and updated information architecture on NWHRC's legacy Content Management System. This allowed NWHRC staff to continue managing the site through the CMS as before—which kept the project cost within NWHRC's budget, and obviated the need for any additional staff training.