River City Rhythm [Website]

Context:

River City Rhythm (RCR) is a non-profit youth performing arts organization based in the Twin Cities metro area. RCR comprises three groups – Indoor Drumline, Winterguard, and Drum Corps – that compete in the Winter Guard International (WGI) and Drum Corps International (DCI), respectively. These groups recruit and work with youth performers from ages 13 to 21 and provide musical education, leadership training, and competitive performance opportunities throughout each competitive season.

As part of the overarching RCR Brand Management portfolio, one of the primary projects that needed to be completed was the redesign and full rebranding of RCR’s website. At the time I began working with RCR, there was a site in production, but the project had stalled and so I was tasked with rebooting and ushering this project through to completion.

Challenges:

The organization’s previous online efforts contained little-to-no written content and an employee of one of the board members was working on an iteration of the site in a CMS that neither myself, nor any of the design and developer colleagues I consulted had ever heard of. There were also several technical issues and platform limitations that required us to take over the ownership of the site and migrate it to a new host. The live site was just as sparse and contained a video background that was causing the site to load extremely slowly.

After recommending a switch to WordPress, a new hosting service, and a full redesign and rebranding, I found myself absorbed in technical elements for which I’d never had to handle before, and subsequently, needing to make a very quick study of domain transfers, DNS host record updates, email configuration and other technical aspects of site work that had already been in place on other projects.

Consultation:

In addition to the technical updates and CMS switch, I recommended that we provide additional text content to the site that focused on telling RCR’s origin story, what the organization offered to prospective members, group accomplishments, and fundraising appeals. The goal with the additional content was to make the site more robust and to help with recruiting efforts for a newer organization that was competing for members who had extremely well-established, close-by options to choose from.

There were several other design elements that also needed improvement, particularly the usability and inclusion of images that provided more context-for-content than the previous site that was focused on the flash of gimmicks (like the use of a video hero background) that were ultimately bogging the load time down and could be turning off prospective members.

Project Scope:

• Recommend and purchase a WordPress theme, then significantly modify it to fit RCR’s brand
• Writing all new relevant site content to attract both end-users and search engines
• Select site imagery to reflect the most recent iteration of the brand then update these yearly to reflect the changes to each group’s latest cast
• Showcase the excellence that is strived for by the Indoor Drumline, Drum Corps, Winterguard and their respective instructors
• Ensured the site wass fully responsive and that important content and functionality is maintained through each breakpoint
• Easily expandable in order to make frequent updates
• Have a fully functional donations section that will allow us to both collect and track RCR’s online donors
• Included a section that focused on the Summer DCI Corps recruitment and contained links to a registration form, camp(s) payments, and supporting content