Radish recently worked with the the Mid-America Regional Council (a.k.a. MARC) to launch a complete redesign of the website for their AirQKC campaign. AirQKC aims to engage families and communities to ensure air quality is at its best.
MARC had ideas about how to update AirQKC.org, but were having a hard time envisioning specifics. The knew they wanted to scale back the cartoony, kid-friendly appearance of the old site (shown below) to reach a wider audience of adults and businesses throughout the Kansas City region, but couldn't pin down much else.
A common challenge for our team is not always having the budget to spend significant time in the areas where our projects are based. This was true for MARC’s project and forced us to think outside-the-box to get to know what this Kansas City organization is about, all the way from Brooklyn. One way we did this was by having the MARC team fill out one of our discovery lab surveys, which helped them to narrow down what they liked and didn’t like about the AirQKC brand.
Our primary focus in the initial phases of the project was to develop a new and improved information architecture for the site. We reorganized all of AirQKC.org’s content under a new skeletal structure, concentrating on making information intuitive to find.
“Distributing the content over the sitemap helped us see the website with new eyes. We began to identify areas where we were weak in content or places where messages and content naturally linked together,” says Doug Norsby, MARC’s project manager and Air Quality Planner.
Creatively, MARC envisioned an interactive website that shone on mobile as well as it did on big screens. We channeled this vision as we designed the site, playing with their modern logo, updating their color palette, and growing up their image selections to relate more to their target audience. MARC has development talent in house and we had the rare luxury of building a static website, something that allowed our development team to have fun with front-end interactions and not worry about shifting content types or updates.
“We were comfortable with enabling the team from Radish Lab to exercise their creativity with confidence that they would include us where needed on items that had functional implications as well as to provide us with sufficient time in general to review the work….In the end the site has genuinely exceeded our expectations, and we are very excited about promoting it through our media campaign and regional partner agencies.”
Despite a tight, 12-week turnaround for the site, we were able to give MARC a final product that they could be proud of. All of the hard work was worth knowing that the customer was satisfied, and that the AirQKC campaign would be even more effective thanks to the accessibility and elegance of its new site.