Best Political Website

The Scholars Strategy Network brings together many of America's leading scholars to address pressing public challenges at the national, state, and local levels. Their target audience is extremely diverse, consisting of policymakers, journalists & bloggers, citizens, SSN members and affiliates. The site therefore needed to have a user-friendly UX, provide an easy means to access the site content, and provide a flexible platform for future site enhancements. Their old site had a completely outdated design, with no calls to action, or means for users to easily self select their relevant content and learn more. Users were also confused by the site structure, unable to navigate to the extensive resources and library tools. The site lacked a CMS for the staff to update any content, making site maintenance costly and time consuming. Finally there were screen resolution & cross-browser display issues. Our solution introduced a clean new design with dynamic rotating content prominently placed on the site, driving users to their desired content. There is new content for their diverse target audience – Scholar Spotlight, SSN Findings, Resources, and a simplified main navigation. Because the site is completely CMS driven all site content can be edited in house and updates posted daily eliminating the bottlenecks from before. Lastly, the new enhanced search allows all users to find targeted content quickly and efficiently. The site went live in the late summer of 2012 and the client and user feedback has been extremely positive, citing easier navigation, search, and relevant content.

Contributors:

Director of Client Services:	Darrin Samaha
Director of Technology:	Jason Schaffer
Project Manager:	Tim Tufts
Director, Scholars Strategy Network:	Theda Skocpol

BLUE CODA

Location: United States