National nonprofit's website redesign amplifies its mission and value

NNPHI provides tremendous value to the chronically overburdened healthcare system in the U.S.—through public health program evaluation, implementation, scaling, and management services, as well as technical assistance and training for public health workers.

But their website infrastructure was not serving them in communicating this value and impact.

Due to a dated, patchworked version of WordPress as their content management system, only a single developer had the necessary access and know-how to publish content to the website.

With a robust slate of programs and initiatives through dozens of partner and member organizations, NNPHI struggled to keep up with communicating its work—and wins—to the broader world, missing critical opportunities to cultivate new partners, members, and funders.
In addition, much of their content was jargon-heavy and organized in ways that were unintuitive for outsiders to discover. They needed fresh messaging and more content pathways for key external audience groups, including:

• public health professionals
• current and prospective member institutes
• funders and philanthropists
• government public health officials

(“Bonus” challenge: Due to federal funding cuts resulting from presidential executive orders, we had to abruptly halt work not once, but twice during the course of this project. A practice of working strictly in sprints throughout development—along with excellent client communication and collaboration!—helped us stay on course and achieve target velocities despite setbacks and uncertainties.)

We knew we needed to both clarify content for website visitors and streamline internal publishing workflows to achieve a successful, sustainable end result for NNPHI. Guided by Pixo’s initial content strategy and UX research, we considered the needs of both back-end and front-end user groups in creating the blueprints for the visual redesign.

Content strategy

We proposed a new information architecture to simplify and clarify menus, streamline content types, and provide better wayfinding throughout the site by interlinking content and purging distracting or unnecessary external links.

We also suggested changes to messaging and tone throughout the site, highlighting outcomes and impact through more narrative-driven content such as success stories and testimonials. To that end, we combined news items, project updates, and press releases to feed into a consolidated blog section, which is featured in the main navigation.

And we improved the usability and appeal of the resource directory by adding taxonomies, metadata, and filtering options. We also increased the directory’s visibility by highlighting relevant resources in context throughout the site with distributed content blocks, including a featured area on the homepage to display flagship resources.

UI design

Our creative partners for this project, Page 33 Studio developed a bold new user interface design to better showcase and infuse NNPHI’s brand story throughout the site.

The vivid, energizing color palette paired with angular design elements evokes momentum and vibrance, underscoring NNPHI’s drive, dynamism, and rigor.

Alternating emphasis between dramatic photos and clean, simple graphics provides visual pacing for the user—prioritizing photography (overlaid with brand elements) where it is most effective for storytelling, and letting key language shine against a minimalist graphic backdrop in other areas.

The homepage design was thoughtfully reconfigured to surface select resources and narratives while keeping the organization’s identity and mission front and center—and, critically, not overwhelming the user with too much content.

CMS and publishing workflow

The Pixo team built a new, custom WordPress CMS for NNPHI tailored for a distributed publishing model. With a back-end infrastructure designed to support several site administrators (of varying technical backgrounds), routine content updates and governance tasks became much more manageable and efficient. This comprehensive effort included:

• Building out custom roles and permissions, so all team members could contribute, in turn, to content publishing workflows.
• Holding a “writing for the web” workshop during the early stages of the project, to help the client team adapt their content for the new site. (And we must say, this client really met the moment in terms of refining and rewriting their content to start fresh on the new site—it made a tremendous impact on the final product!)
• Hosting (and recording) a hands-on content author training session, so they could get oriented to their CMS before launch.

This redesigned WordPress site helped NNPHI achieve bolder storytelling and a more substantial brand presence while streamlining internal operations, positioning them to maintain—and expand—their essential resources and the growing network that relies on them.