Arent Fox

Website Redesign

Overview

At its core, this project was about two things: brand design and information architecture.

Arent Fox’s old site was dark and confusing, and with one main site and five microsites, it was difficult to manage. To create a cohesive brand identity and streamlined information architecture, we moved the site into a redesigned Drupal 8 website.

To achieve this vision, I worked closely with the designer on the page layout, sketching wireframes and stress-testing designs with both short- and long-form examples of real content from the legacy site. I dove really deep into information architecture and migration, using MySQL to query their databases and facilitate migration. On this project, I:

• Led content strategy and UX activities to determine the site structure and page layout
• Led migration efforts of six websites from Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 platforms into a single, new Drupal 8 CMS by:
  • Determining content types
  • Mapping legacy fields to new fields
  • Working with a developer on creating yaml files
• Led search engine optimization activities by determining keywords and important site structure components
• Worked with developers on 508 compliance
• Simplified the Practices and Industries taxonomies
• Trained two new content strategists

PRoject structure & Work Products

This website redesign was structured as semi-agile. We organized our work around biweekly client demos and working sessions. To prepare for these sessions, we sketched internally to create page designs. I only created a handful of formal deliverables on this project and delivered them several days before our working sessions to generate feedback. This approach saved us considerable time in editing documents and soliciting formal signoff. This deliverable was the largest on the project; it included:

• Content strategy
• Sitemap
• Content type information

Content Strategy

Instead of creating one large content strategy, we created a series of them around each biweekly sprint demo. Linked is the first of six content strategy memos, delivered a couple of days before the associated sprint demo. Each of these biweekly memos was designed to provide the client with an understanding of our internal work and recommendations and generate feedback.

These documents were not updated after our meetings; instead, the decision points were translated directly into project requirements, and we created JIRA tickets for each.

Sitemap

You will notice in the sitemap section of the content strategy that we include not only a link to a visual sitemap (tree-style) but also a chart of the site structure with information about what content is on each page. Though I love the ease of traditional sitemaps—how quick and easy it is to see where everything goes on a new site, I find them very confusing for clients, making it difficult for them to envision where content lives on their new site. To facilitate this understanding, I began creating these content charts to provide greater context on the site structure.

Content Type Information

There is information about the first content types we developed as well. Between the client’s six sites, there were 39 content types, many of which we determined could be eliminated or merged to make the site easier to manage. Determining fields in some of these early in the process allowed our backend developers to get started sooner and our migration developer to begin stress-testing migrations with real content.

conclusion

Six months after kickoff, we were ready to launch arentfox.com and received high praise from the firm's partners. We are continuing our strategic engagement with this client and continue to make feature improvements outside of the original scope.