[ Client Work ]
New website and e-newsletter showcase incarcerated people’s stories
A project for More Than Our Crimes
Services
- Creative Strategy
- Web Design
- Digital Design
- Web Development
- Post-Launch Website Care
More Than Our Crimes is dedicated to bringing the voices of incarcerated people forward and highlighting horrific conditions in U.S. prisons with first-hand accounts. Their website and e-newsletter are critical platforms for this work.
The previous More Than Our Crimes website had only a few brief static pages, requiring users to go offsite to their Medium blog for updated dynamic content. Their e-newsletter was a text email without branding or an email provider to track analytics.
More Than Our Crimes needed a more robust new website with strong design and dynamic content to raise awareness and inspire action. They also needed a more visually-appealing e-newsletter and SEO / analytics support to stay connected with their audience and monitor engagement.
Our Solution
To begin planning this website, we conducted a careful needs analysis and strategic planning session. From there, we crafted a new sitemap and plans for functionality, content and design. We took specific care to map out what types of dynamic content were needed and how they would be organized into taxonomies.
Starting with the existing More Than Our Crimes logo and colors, we built out a strong, energetic brand system with more robust typography (fonts), photo styling, and other elements. We intentionally kept the overall feel somewhat stark and minimalist to create assertive energy and keep focus on the content.
As we designed and built the new site, we used custom post types with new taxonomies and custom fields to organize the content and make it more accessible to users. This is a major improvement that has allowed More Than Our Crimes to promote different kinds of content and keep traffic on their own website rather than Medium.
We helped More Than Our Crimes get set up with an email service provider for better control over their lists, deliverability and analytics. We designed and coded a custom e-newsletter template that’s now an important part of their outreach.
After the website and e-newsletter were launched, we conducted an SEO analysis with recommendations and set them up on Google Analytics 4. We’re excited to see audience reach and engagement steadily expanding.
