FortWhyte Alive

As a busy and growing organization serving many audiences, FortWhyte Alive was searching for a content strategy that would improve its online visitor experience. Over the years, the WordPress website evolved into hundreds of pages of information that were difficult to navigate. The organization wanted to make its content easy to find and more accessible to those with visual and other impairments. An additional website design goal was to replicate the journey of discovery FortWhyte Alive visitors have when in person when visiting the organization online.

This project was completed by team members at Manoverboard, who are now part of Mangrove. An in-depth discovery process involving leadership consultations and visitor focus groups helped establish a content strategy that would inform a complete reorganization and design of the website. We pared down the current site’s content, reshaping it into digestible and skimmable copy that engages, excites and educates. Now, from whatever page visitors are viewing, they can quickly get to another page with ease. We also enabled those visiting FortWhyte online to explore programming organically — presenting related activities that might be of interest to guide their discovery. We built the site to comply with Level A of the WCAG 2.1 guidelines to improve accessibility.

Using a customized WordPress platform, we integrated several third-party tools to enable an events calendar, member management, and donations. We either built these tools directly into the site or styled them to look and feel like they are part of the site, giving visitors a seamless experience.

Our work designing the FortWhyte Alive website received an Awwwards Honorable Mention indicating that the site achieved high scores from its industry-led jury and community users. Awwwards recognizes the talent and effort of the best web designers, developers and agencies in the world.