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California Certified Organic Farmers

A Large-scale Website

Making Organic Easier

California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a nonprofit organization that advances organic agriculture for a healthy world through organic certification, education, advocacy, and promotion, partnered with Radish Lab to overhaul their website. CCOF is a leader in the organic community, and their current site did not hold up to the needs of their team or users.

Scale, organization, and usability were key pain points the CCOF team brought to Radish as priorities for the new website. Radish Lab collaborated with key CCOF stakeholders to rebuild their site with thoughtful information architecture and taxonomies to make information easy to find, whether users are looking for certification, education, or advocacy information.

Project details

User Interface Design
Report & Publication Design
Print Design
Analytics & Optimization
Web Development
User Experience
Information Architecture
Stakeholder Alignment
Content Strategy
Brand Strategy
SEO

Streamlined Website Structure

The existing CCOF site was a sprawling experience (our data discovery pull indicated at least 11,400 pages within their site) with many pages containing nested navigation – making it difficult for users to find what they were looking for. The biggest challenge for Radish during the strategy and user experience phases was to distill from their enormous site what was essential, what could be removed, and what could be consolidated to streamline the user experience.

The most important area of improvement for CCOF’s new site structure was the navigation. CCOF provides resources to a wide range of audiences – some users need to log into their portal to access important documents, others are looking for basic information on organic farming, others are seeking to get certified. A distinct utility navigation that prioritizes quick links for key audiences helped to make specific resources available to users on a mission, without requiring them to engage with the high-level information housed in the main navigation.  Additionally, CCOF comprises three separate entities, each with their own legal and personal requirements.

At the end of the UX process,  the Radish team had consolidated many one-off pages into organized posts housed in a robust resource library and converted a large quantity of nested tabs into user-focused dropdowns and landing pages, helping users to find what they need with swift searches and few clicks.

Improved Taxonomies and Search Function

A side effect of the existing site’s sprawling scale was poor search functionality. With so many posts to maintain, it was hard to manage a concise and specific list of taxonomies to ensure that users were able to efficiently find what they need. During the Discovery phase, we learned that many users preferred searching the site with Google to using the site’s search function. Additionally, a unique challenge in this project was maintaining the existing integration between CCOF’s taxonomies and those of the USDA. Improved search functionality and taxonomies in the backend were key to the success of the new site.

Radish Lab worked with the CCOF team to get a better understanding of their key offerings, audience needs, and legal requirements, and developed a streamlined taxonomy set to help the CCOF team easily tag all of their existing and future content.

This also allowed for their stories, resources, and vendors to show up in both global searches and featured content. CCOF is known for their robust resource offerings, as well as their directory of organic farmers (the directory alone has 8,000+ entries). The improved search functionality, taxonomies, and overall site structure aimed to make both the resource library and farm database more functional for both new and seasoned CCOF users.

Templates and a Modular Approach

Certification organizations need to meet specific legal parameters, so as Radish worked through reorganizing and improving the structure of CCOF’s website, we needed to keep in mind that each of the three entities within CCOF have different considerations at play. By prioritizing templates that work across multiple content types, Radish was able to improve the layout and functionality of a wide array of sections on the CCOF site that are easily segmented by user while staying within the necessary legal guardrails.

In addition to templatizing content types when possible, we built CCOF’s site using Radish Lab’s modular system to ensure that the site is flexible enough to change and grow as CCOF’s needs and offerings do. Throughout the design process – from wireframes to user interface – the Radish team delineated connections to the WordPress CMS, offering the CCOF team tasked with managing the site a clear understanding of the modules in their toolkit.

Responsive Design

As with all Radish Lab websites, we designed the new CCOF site to be thoughtfully responsive across multiple breakpoints, ensuring users have a great experience on any device. CCOF specifically needed to optimize for mobile usage, as many of their key users need to access their database when they do not have access to a computer.  Radish’s responsive mobile designs, in combination with our holistic approach to accessibility, ensure that rich content and important information is always available to users – whether they’re in the office or, quite literally, in the field.

Thoughtful Brand Editing

CCOF came to Radish with a very robust brand that they liked pieces of, but they needed help streamlining it for this new iteration of their website. Delivering on CCOF’s hopes for a clean, clear website that felt like “a breath of fresh air,” the Radish team embraced a limited palette that complemented their photography, accentuated calls to action, and added rich contrast against a soft, off-white neutral to break up pages.

As with all Radish projects, we prioritized accessible-first design. The application of CCOF’s revised palette is always WCAG AA compliant, ensuring that color combinations meet accessibility requirements We also clearly documented how colors should be used in future assets the CCOF team  produces.

Check out the live site here to see all the improvements in action

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