Back in January I decided that most of my web sites needed a serious re-design, and I decided to start with my most heavily visited site, AnimalRights.net. In April, I contacted Yanisar Enterprises about doing such a redesign, and seven months later you can see the fruits of that collaboration here.
I initially chose Yanisar because I was impressed with some of the other projects they’d done and they had experience with Conversant, the content management system that drives this site. The project started out being largely a cosmetic makeover of the site. But as it progressed, it became clear that bigger changes were needed and pretty much every major part of the site was both re-designed and re-configured. The end result is a site that highlight just how flexible Conversant is as a CMS.
One of the things I’m most pleased about, for example, is being able to provide context-sensitive information and links for popular search terms. Look, for example, at what the user sees if they search for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. That is something that never occurred to me but the folks at Yanisar suggested and after a couple of fits and starts trying to figure out how to get it to work, it works like a charm.
The site’s home page is an excellent mix that combines a weblog-centric view of the site with all sorts of links to related stories, recent discussion group threads, etc. One of the challenges we faced in redesigning this site is that there are more than 2,000 articles there about the animal rights movement, and an additional 1,100 or so topical pages along with the discussion group that has something like 75,000 posts. The home page design that Yanisar came up with slices through all that and gives a quick web-site-at-a-glance view at the underlying foundations of the site.
The Discussion Forum also received a much-needed overhaul. It is now much easier and friendly to use than before.
There are a couple of features still to be implemented, including a system for doing user profiles, but as it is now the final results far exceeded my initial expectations. When I started out, the goal was simply to give the site a cosmetic facelift, but as the project actually got underway it resulted in a lot of structural changes that have really improved the site’s usability dramatically over what it had been like.
I’d wholeheartedly recommend Yanisar Enterprises for someone wanting to do a redesign, and I personally plan to keep them busy redesigning my other websites.