Case Study : International Institute for Analytics

Reorganization & restructure

IIA’s site was loosely structured and had a number of pages that were difficult to find. So our first step was to work with IIA to take inventory of everything and organize it all in a way that made sense. To do this, we created two key documents: a site structure spreadsheet and a set of low fidelity wireframes.

The site structure spreadsheet was used in place of a more traditional site map. The reason for going this route was primarily for better collaboration and to show how URLs would change which was a critical component for development and long-term SEO.

The wireframes then broke the sections and pages down into more detail to show the content needed and roughly how they might be laid out. This was an important piece for visualization of content organization.

UI design

Working closely with the team at IIA we were able to determine a few specifics about what the site should look like overall – relatively simple but engaging and more closely tied to their brand. We also looked at sites in similar spaces and competitor sites and determined to move in a slightly different direction than the crowd by working with a lighter color palette. The creation of a few custom graphics, paired with their visual brand, and keeping the typography large and readable made for a more comprehensive and easy to use site that didn’t feel drab or boring.

Platform migration

Long before we even got to the development phase, IIA had agreed that Craft CMS would be the optimal choice for this project and for their long-term goals which include their client portal. The biggest technical challenge was getting content out of Squarespace. IIA had literally hundreds of blog articles on their previous site which was powered by the Squarespace platform. Unfortunately exporting content from Squarespace is less than ideal unless you’re moving to WordPress

Our solution for migrating the blog was multi-step: we exported from Squarespace into a format WordPress could easily import; we set up a non-public dummy WordPress site to import that content and exported the content from it; then using the lovely Feed Me plugin for Craft CMS, we then imported that content into Craft. While this seems easy on the surface, this process also included cleaning up categories in WordPress as much as possible (with further pruning in Craft), as well as pruning other types of content such as authors which Squarespace doesn’t handle at all. All in all, the whole process took roughly a week total to get the content right.