This slidecast shows part of the work I did for Cascadia. For an overview of that project, see Cascadia.edu website redesign.
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content strategy
Cascadia.edu website redesign
“Thank you for all you have done during this project! Your knowledge and skills, your patience and persistence, your continual search for information about effective sites, and on and on… We’ve learned a lot from you and have appreciated your commitment to quality.” —Linda Hendrickson, Cascadia Community College
Client: Cascadia Community College is a feeder school for the University of Washington. It shares its state-of-the-art, wetland-lined campus with UW Bothell. The magazine Washington Monthly named Cascadia the No. 2 community college 
in the United States.
Challenges: Cascadia’s old website got little traffic because users found it hard to find what they needed, even if the information did exist on the site. The site did not communicate the college’s strengths or provide much information that prospective college students commonly look for. The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
To plan and create Cascadia’s new website, I worked with Cascadia’s marketing and communications department and dozens of members of college staff and administration, providing these deliverables:
- Homepage design for Cascadia.edu
- Cascadia.edu information architecture and content migration plan
- Content coaching, guides, and templates for content authors, including standards and guidelines for metadata and microcontent (for usability and search optimization)
- Writing and editing for selected pages
- Wireframes for web applications
- Goals and audiences brief (summary of responses to a strategy questionnaire filled out during a day-long meeting with stakeholders)
- Brand plan including audience definition, site priorities, and audience profiles (developed with Tauber-Kienan Associates)
- Consulting on social media strategy
- Expert evaluation of earlier proposed design
Keyword at work
I worked with Lisa Galley to decide what keywords to include in page titles and navigation on the redesigned Galley Eco Capital website. Here’s an example of those keywords at work in the outside world:
Lisa’s post of May 20, 2009 , on her blog Our Green Journey, links to a post on sustainability as investment at One Block Off the Grid (1BOG).
On the 1BOG post, look for the phrase “commitment to sustainability,” which we identified as a keyword phrase during the redesign of the Galley Eco Capital site. The 1BOG post links that keyword phrase back to a page on Galley Eco Capital site titled — what else — Our Commitment to Sustainability .
This keyword loop increases traffic to Galley Eco Capital’s site, improves search results, and enhances the site’s usability (by reinforcing phrases that are relevant to the site’s audience).
» More about website strategy for Galley Eco Capital
Website redesign for green real estate consultant
Client: Galley Eco Capital, San Francisco
Challenges: Old site did not describe company’s current services; site lacked keywords that would support usability and search engine optimization.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
To help the company generate more leads in a rapidly growing and shifting market, I wrote and organized new website content. First, I interviewed principal and financing expert Lisa Galley, then provided these deliverables:
- Strategy summary Summary of goals and priorities for the site and other strategic information
- Site outline Map showing navigation to the information and functions on the site
- Homepage wireframe Diagram of the homepage, with space assigned to the highest-priority goals defined in the strategy summary
- Site content Content that supported Galley Eco Capital’s strategic business priorities and followed usability guidelines for web content
New homepage
Live page at:
galleyecocapital.com
Content strategy for design portfolio
Client: Aaron Marcus and Associates, user interface design; www.amanda.com
Challenges: Develop a model for a portfolio of work by a user interface design firm.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
I provided architecture and content for one portfolio entry that served as a model implemented by AM+A. The model included a summary and basic details about each project and accommodated animated screenshots of key functionality.
For more details
… or to discuss your project, contact us.
How-tos for WebTV subscribers
Client: WebTV (Microsoft)
Challenges: Describe to people who have never used computers (or, in some cases, even a typewriter) some basic features of WebTV and the Web, and how to begin using them.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
Many WebTV subscribers were unaware of how they could use WebTV. To help new subscribers get started and to reduce subscriber churn, I wrote tips that subscribers received in a series of emails. The tips:
- Used plain language to explain basic features of WebTV and the Web, such as the address book and bookmarking, and used common real-world tasks in examples
- Concentrated key phrases in subject lines to communicate the topic and benefit of each tip (so that the subscriber would know whether the message was of interest without opening it)
- Included links in the tips to the relevant functionality in WebTV
For more details
… or to discuss your project, contact us.
Website redesign for educational products company
Client: Lightspan Partnership
Challenges: Present a complex line of educational products and services for K-12 students and teachers.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
I developed all content for Lightspan’s new site, including:
- Descriptions of products and services targeted at teachers and administrators
- Promotional headlines and copy
- Corporate content
- Page layout and contextual links
- Consulting on site architecture and navigation
For more details
… or to discuss your project, contact us.
Website for the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, at archive.org, has been making copies of the Web since 1996. It’s a free library of virtually all publicly available sites on the web.
In 1999 the Internet Archive asked me to develop a new site that would communicate the Archive’s mission for the public good and serve as a resource on privacy, copyright, and other complex legal issues.
Here are before-and-after links to archive.org (courtesy of the Archive’s own Wayback Machine):
Before: Archive.org in October 1999
After: In April 2000
Website redesign for software developer
Client: Tom Sawyer Software, graph visualization software developer
Challenges: Convince potential customers in many industries of the business and technical benefits of the company’s graph visualization technology, which is is used to create visual representations of complex data.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
Tom Sawyer’s products were designed to be embedded in other software products that are used to store, manipulate, or generate such data. The products had applications in diverse industries: network management, software design, human resource management, criminology, and others.
The old website was heavy on descriptions of technical features, but the company needed to communicate with business decision makers as well as engineers. I reorganized and added to the content to target a wider audience, make the site more visually appealing and interactive, and provide more opportunities for site visitors to contact the company.
For more details
… or to discuss your project, contact us.