Website Design
For The Lighthouse Mission- TEAM: Variant
- ROLE: Lead Designer
- YEAR: 2018
The Lighthouse Mission has been providing shelter, meals and compassionate services to men, women and children in need throughout Whatcom County since 1923. In 2017, they were in need of a new website. While their current site provided a wealth of information, an outdated framework and disjointed navigation structure made that information difficult to access. I was lead designer on the team tasked with reorganizing the content and designing a site that would convey the spirit of the organization while remaining focused on its three primary objectives: Donation, Volunteering and Outreach.
Bringing Information to the Surface
The overall design strategy centered around funneling information. We started by creating reusable tiles for each of the three primary objectives (above). Then designed tiled landing pages for each of the top-level navigation points. Each landing page is comprised of a brief overview for all of its subpages (1) and a prominently placed key objective tile (2) giving users a skimmable reference to help them quickly decide where they want to go while keeping primary objectives a click away at all times.
The Reason for Giving
Another aim of the site was to keep focus on the guests of the Mission–the very reason it exists. In its previous iteration, the site had a series of posts featuring the stories of guests that have received help from the Mission. We leveraged this history by building a top-level landing page for existing stories as well as new ones going forward. Additionally, we linked to targeted, relevant stories from within service pages of the site, providing a face and a personal story for each offering and reinforcing the importance of the help the Mission seeks to provide.
