This morning we launched a brand new site for Urban Youth Workers Institute. They are a Los Angeles based non-profit committed to resourcing and encouraging those who invest in the lives of urban youth.
Our relationship with UYWI began with a consult as I looked deep into their analytics and helped them create a conversion funnel for a couple web initiatives. In truth, their biggest problem in their web strategy was that their site wasn’t working properly. It took 5-8 seconds to load a page fully. Their site wasn’t consistently reporting sitemap data to Google, on and on.
Long story short, we salvaged the WordPress installation and were able to rebuild the site from the ground up. Today it’s a lot faster, more stable, completely compliant with normal WordPress practices.
Here’s a quick list of what we did.
- Used the Thesis framework to build an easily upgradable theme.
- Widened the page significantly to get more important content above the fold of every page.
- Corrected an installation issue with many .htaccess redirects, which slowed page load.
- Eliminated many plugins used to make the theme functional, but caused PHP errors.
- Simplified the template structure using child theming, decreasing page load and scripting errors.
- Simplified the CSS to create a more consistent look/feel.
- Eliminated single instance javascripts from loading on every page, causing general slowness.
- Gravity Forms for handling all of the contact forms, applications, and even a new job board coming soon.
- Premium slider for a lightweight display of mission critical graphics.
- Events Calendar Pro integration to organize and simplify their busy events.
- Shopp for their growing online store (We didn’t install this but now support it)
- S2Member Pro handles their premium content areas. (We didn’t install this but now support it.)
We’re pleased with how this project turned out and look forward to how this will help them better drive traffic through their conversion funnel.
