Urban Advantage

Client

www.urbanadvantagenyc.org

American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) – one of the largest museums in the world, has employed us to design and develop a brand-new site for their partnership program called Urban Advantage.

STARTING POINT

Before we met with our client, the Urban Advantage program had a WordPress site. It was pretty dated, mostly in terms of navigation. Wandering through the site was a bit of a challenge for a regular user because of the poorly made menu, lots of unstructured content and lack of spacing. The red-and-black color scheme was not fitting as well, as it is typically associated with danger, rage, anger and even anarchy.

Definitely not a suitable pallette for a website aimed at children and promotes a positive change.
Ultimately, it was a very wise decision to redesign the site on the client’s part. And that’s where we came into play.

GOAL

The goal was to design a new website for Urban Advantage program that would help target users find relevant information about the program and showcase UA as sophisticated, technologically advanced, but inviting, user-friendly and cool thing to join.

PROGRESS

We started off by doing brand ID revisions and brand guidelines creation, which you can read about here

After brand ID was approved, we moved onto the home page design. We changed the color pallette and the overall look of the site and at the same time kept the Urban Advantage original branding colors – red and black. However the look and feel of the site was completely different.

The use of light grey and white made the content more comprehensive at a first glance, whilst the red and black colors created attractive and delicious menus and titles.

We’ve also completely rebuilt the website navigation and structure, making it a lot more user-friendly and clean. It is super easy to navigate through the menu as well as through the whole site. Everything is clean, simple but exquisite.

The site was made responsive and is now easily accessible from any mobile device, including smartphones and tablets. This is a must-have feature for any modern website.

Functional development of the site began with the custom theme creation. The custom theme made the site unique, made it truly stand out above the endless amount of sites developed with ready-made purchasable themes that look so alike. Another advantage of the custom theme is that it has no useless functions and features, which makes the site operate as fast and smooth as possible.

One of the most notable features of the site is the Event Calendar. You can browse the events by UA institutions, date range and custom dates, and when you find one that interests you, adding it to your agenda takes just a click. It supports Google calendar, the iCalendar, the Outlook and the Yahoo Calendars – the most popular calendar services in the world.

It is pretty easy to use in the backend as well: an admin fills the document which is then converted to a .csv file and uploaded to the site. And that’s it!

It is worth mentioning about the fact that throughout the whole development process we’ve had absolutely no major issues, thanks to the mutual understanding between our project manager, our developers and our client. That was a great example of excellent teamwork, which by the way resulted in a great review from our client:

“We had no concerns or problems throughout the course of this project. Their customer service is also absolutely amazing.” – Asish George, Senior Product Manager

ACHIEVED RESULT

Using a great logo and color scheme, we’ve managed to complete an astonishing redesign project. The new site fully reaches its goals, helping school students as well as their parents be a part of the Urban Advantage program and visit incredible places with ease, unachievable ever before.