Too often, small cultural organizations don’t have the time or resources to hire out, well, nearly anything. And so, they end up doing their own publications, their own stationary, and their own website. Such was the case with GambianCulture.com – an arts and culture school in the Gambia, West Africa.
When we started working with the school, their website was in rough shape. It has the content and the idea, but the design got in the way. It looked unprofessional, and that was a bar to many potential applicants who wanted to feel they were working with a first rate organization, especially because they would be traveling abroad, often to a completely foreign environment.
It was also done in tables, had excess code for the design, and didn’t have tags that matched the text, all of which made it less visible in search engines. Once we got to work, we researched the look and feel of other cultural organizations, and picked the ones we felt most strongly conveyed a purpose. We made the site more image driven, so that each section had a compelling image to go with the text. We also did it in pure CSS so that the code is minimal, the load speed is extremely fast even with the background images, and the pages are extremely easy for search engines to read and index.
In a relatively small market, these changes were able to double the traffic coming to the site over the course of six months, and improved the percentage of users who were requesting more information. As the fall approaches and students will be planning January term sessions and study abroad for the spring semester (which are the main target times for study in the Gambia) the true measure of the changes will be visible as we can compare signups with last year.
To see before and after screen shots as well as traffic statistics, check out http://d5labs.com/2008/07/18/changing-the-face-of-a-cultural-organization/