The University of British Columbia Faculty Association (UBCFA) is a non-profit organization that facilitates the social and employment relationships between faculty members and the university. It also functions as a union, and handles matters of collective bargaining for faculty members, who serve on the UBCFA, on a democratically elected volunteer basis. They came to us looking to modernize their website, with the goal of making it responsive for mobile and easier to use on the back end.
What We Delivered:
- Web Design
- Responsive Website
- Google Custom Search Integration
- Custom WordPress Development
The Challenge
The old UBCFA website had been hugely cluttered, with masses of unorganized content that had become impossible to sift through. This made the website very difficult to use, and especially difficult to update. The old site was hard-coded, and when new content needed to be added, someone with programming knowledge had to do it. This was a frustrating and unsustainable process, which was the main point that our site redesign was going to address.
Other issues that people had with the old UBCFA site ranged from the fact that it wasn’t responsive for mobile devices, to its simply having font that was too small in many areas, both of which made people reluctant or unable to use the site as it was intended. These were the barriers we faced when we undertook this website redesign project.
A registered non-profit society incorporated under the Society Act in British Columbia, the University of British Columbia Faculty Association (UBCFA ) is a voluntarily recognized union and the sole bargaining agent for over 3000 UBC faculty members.
The Association’s website, although well-organized and easy to navigate, was becoming old. Not optimized for the multitude of devices used to access the web, it also required specialized knowledge in order to make any content updates. KIMBO Design took our old site and redeveloped it, providing a fresh look and feel that brought our web presence up to date but still in keeping with the site’s original organizational structure. Functionality was improved and, by rebuilding it on the WordPress platform, it’s now much more accessible and easier to work with.
Cynthia Thom
Communications Coordinator
The Strategy
The strategy for this site was to strip it down to the foundational elements, and then rebuild it in a simple and dynamic way, that would provide all the necessary functionality without the cluttered and cumbersome content pile of the old website. Our first step in achieving this goal was a better design, with larger fonts that would aid in the site’s responsivity. At KIMBO, the graphic and web design processes are intricately linked, with our designers considering the implications that their designs have in the age of responsive websites, in order to make the lives of our developers easier. Streamlining the project process like this allows for our time to be better spent on the creative and technical aspects that make our sites, like UBCFA, shine and function to their fullest.
The custom Google search feature we implemented goes well beyond the standard WordPress functionality. UBCFA has many PDFs uploaded to their site, and the ability to search inside those PDFs to get at the rich content was very important.
Results
What we created with this site was a revamped, accessible and responsive information resource for the UBCFA, framed with a signature minimal KIMBO Design layout. Our custom WordPress design removed the issues of content addition and disorganization by establishing a highly intuitive and simple back end, which didn’t require any coding knowledge to use. We instituted a Google Custom Search feature, which allowed site users to search the contents of the PDF documents on the site, not just their file names. The new WordPress site included an RSS feed that made the site available to intranet users, and made for seamless integration with other UBC platforms.
