When I came to Earthjustice as its new Director of Online Strategies in October 2007, the organization's website was in disarray. The fluid design destabilized the page layout; the look was cluttered, content lacked a sense of priority, and nowhere on the home page was any indication of the organization's purpose or mission statement. I was later told that several Development staffers refused to send potential donors to the website because of its poor design.

I'd promised the Vice President of Communications who hired me that I wouldn't make any major changes to the website during my first week. But by the end of the second week, my team and I had developed a new look and feel for the home page while retaining the banner and navigation elements (consistent throughout the website).

My first step was to create a series of rotating billboards across the top of the page that succinctly articulated our Mission Statement and highlighted several current online campaigns and advocacy initiatives. Next, we created a content well in the center of the page that separated home page content in three categories: a "Spotlight" that showcased top-level website features; "Hot off the Press," which included our most recent press releases; and "Our Current Cases," which featured the three most important legal cases currently in court.

The new content well was bracketed by a series of in-house ads along the left side that linked to our current fundraising campaign (or an evergreen "Donate Now" page), and three micro-sites hosted by Earthjustice. Along the right side of the content well, we created a new series of graphics that linked to six of the most important "landing pages" on the site: the Earthjustice Action Center (housing all our current advocacies), a "Donate Now" fundraising page, links to our Blogs and a monthly column from the organization's president, and links to "Who We Are" (About Us) and "Our Clients."

Finally, we added a graphic in the left navigation bar to highlight an in-line form for subscribing to our monthly newsletter, e.Brief.

We also added source codes to all the links in order to measure traffic and click-through rates from the new home page as part of our long-term strategy to optimize the overall online user experience.

Once the new home page was successfully launched, we set about upgrading many of the key landing pages. Follow the "next" link to view several other new or revised pages...