REDESIGNING KFF.ORG

Battle Entropy

Where We Started

And here’s where we landed: www.kff.org

What was happening in 2003?

• Facebook was a college network.

• MySpace & Friendster were cool.

• No Twitter.

• No YouTube.

• Palm Pilots and Blackberries; no smartphones.

• Flash was big.

Redesign Goals

• Create a more cohesive web presence by consolidating websites.

• Create an intuitive site architecture to reflect how users search and user information.

• Improve search.

• Make content more accessible on a variety of devices.

• Streamline CMSs and improve efficiency and ease of posting content.

The Kaiser Family of Sites

The Process: In the Beginning

• Engaged staff from the beginning and throughout the process.

• Defined goals.

• Got buy-in from senior management and our board and stayed in touch with them throughout the process.

• Developed comprehensive RFP, selecting firms that specialize in a variety of CMSs.

Why WordPress?

Matt Mullenweg:

Here, check out how your home page

would look in WordPress.

Drew Altman:

We’re starting to redesign our website.

20 minutes later…

Why We Really Chose WordPress

• Kff.org is a deep, complex site. Why not Drupal? – Alley Interactive first pitched Drupal.

– Concerns about ease-of-use and costly and labor-intensive upgrading.

• WordPress’ intuitive backend.

• Beginning to see other enterprise-wide sites developed on WordPress.

• Ability to use plugins: Slideshare and Verite.

• Open source environment would allow us freedom to develop new features quickly and at low-cost.

• Evaluate content types – We ended up with 30+ custom content types

• Evaluate what historical content to migrate– We ended up migrating 90% of content

• Convened an organization-wide taxonomy task force– Reorganized content for topic-based website

– Resulted in 10 topics, 150 site-wide tags, plus 2 additional taxonomies

• Planned for a more visual website– “Let Data Tell the Story”

– Convened task force to research new ways to visualize our data

– Prepped for ability to feature data graphics in key places on new site

Moving Mountains (of data): Prepping for the Migration

• Content migration was an iterative process.

• It’s never too early to clean up your current site and remove content that’s no longer useful. (This will take longer than you think.)

• Don’t underestimate the amount of time a successful migration will take.

• Prepare for a period of dual entry.

Lessons Learned

• Design needed to account for how to present 100+ page reports online and present reports with heavy use of charts/slides.

• Make fact sheets easy to read, easy for search engines to discover content and easy to update.

• Present large amounts of data.

• Highlight the stable of Kaiser’s slides.

• Give graphics & interactives more visibility.

Designing for Digital First Strategy

• Alley Interactive worked with VIP to develop for kff.org the first faceted search for elastic search.

• Ability for users to refine by types of content, tags and topics.

• Still user testing.

Search

Coming This Month to a Computer, Tablet, or Phone near you!

Join the Battle

Questions?