Total 522 words used.
As our company has evolved to serve different industries and professions, we discovered an opportunity to redesign our website to establish a stronger connection between Ascend and its portfolio of brands and present a fuller picture of our impact. We also sought to create a site that closely adhered to modern web design best practices including better responsive design and UX/UI elements, multimedia integration (video) and ADA compliance.
Additionally, we wanted to employ a design that would help make our brand more human-focused by incorporating more photos of our own team members and adopting a warmer, human-centered tone by bringing forward the voice of employees — from our individual contributors all the way up to our senior leaders — to tell the story of our meaningful work, our impact and our values-driven, people-first culture. Lastly, we wanted to generate excitement, interest and affinity for our brand and create an engaging platform to illustrate what makes Ascend a unique place to work and help attract top talent.
With these established goals, we embarked on a website refresh project to migrate the site from Wordpress into the Magento platform. An internal cross-functional team collaborated to create a website with a fresh, modern design that's optimized for search engines and mobile devices and features enhanced navigation organized in a way that helps users quickly understand the company's scope and depth, and present Ascend as a desirable place to work.
The project started by interviewing internal stakeholders to learn what our teams and our brands need from our website to achieve their goals. We then partnered with our UX team to conduct research on the then current site and user testing of multiple designs and navigation to gain insights on site navigability and content, and to identify opportunities to enhance the user experience.
We also interviewed more than 65 team members about the employee experience, our purpose and impact and what it means to help change lives through our meaningful work. These interviews were then formatted as Q&A-style blog posts in addition to call-out graphics that are displayed on every page in a clickable (desktop) and swipe-able (mobile) slider.
Additionally, a brand-new video, "Purpose-Driven, People-Focused," was developed for the website featuring testimonials from employees across Ascend and we interviewed each member of our senior leadership team (SLT) and updated their bios for the Our People page. Each SLT member bio includes an inspirational quote about our people, culture and our impact and a link to full Q&As on our blog.
We also partnered with internal marketing teams to create fresh copy for each of our brands, using short, bulleted statements that highlight their expertise, solutions, milestones and impact on the industries and professions they serve. In the backend, all pages were updated with fresh meta titles, tags and descriptions to enhance SEO.
After final designs were completed and content was populated, we demoed the site for final feedback, testing and refinements before launching in September 2023. Initial site analytics show increases in multiple metrics: page views are up 99%, users are up 12% and sessions are up 10%. Our bounce rate also improved by 37%.
Nomination Title: Ascendlearning.com Web Writing and Content
