Our partner organization IUCN Netherlands commissioned me, through EcoAgriculture Partners, to develop a new website to drive signups/downloads of our Landscape Investment and Finance Toolkit (LIFT) and provide access to newly produced training resources for LIFT users.
Structure
I organized the site into three expandable sections:
- Product Description
- Use Cases
- Help Center
The Product Description page is the home/landing page. The function of the page is to drive signups to download LIFT (by “joining the LIFT Community”). This gives the site’s primary purpose primary placement within the site hierarchy.
The Use Case page currently displays the single detailed Use Case we have created, based on one of the initial pilot landscapes where the toolkit was co-designed and tested, Cagayan de Oro (CDO) Landscape, in the Philippines. I had help from graduate student intern Eghosa Asemota in editing a cell phone video interview with a leader from CDO into mobile-friendly story snippets. We created a Vimeo profile for LIFT to accompany the site and host all the videos.
The Use Case section of the site is intended to grow to include Use Case profiles from around the world with similar story structures and associated video content. The Use Case menu item will change to Use Cases and a landing page allowing users to browse all use case stories at a glance will take the place of the single use case page.
For the Help Center, I deployed WordPress’s standard post archive page template, which allowed us to use the Post section of the WP backend to manage all new help center content, and to keep new content at the top as our users come to rely on the help center for understanding new features and updates, and as we develop additional material in response to feedback raising common questions or issues.
Technology/Technique
The task was to upgrade the site from a single fully-responsive landing page, which I had built in Adobe Muse in 2017, that had served us well for the launch of the toolkit, to a more expansible platform for a growing site that would eventually be able to support an interactive community and web-app deployment for version 2.0 of the toolkit. I used WordPress (WP) to accommodate this: stability, ease of multi-author contributions, expansibility through plug-ins, and a very helpful user/designer community made WP an easy choice.
Designing the site was a fun opportunity to fully deploy a new tool I was learning for web design in WP: Elementor. I signed up for Elementor’s Plus package, which gives you access to pre-designed page and section templates and the ability to save custom templates to a personal library for re-use across your site or in other projects. During the design process, Elementor released their Hello WP theme that is basically a perfectly-prepared blank canvas for designing using Elementor.
Popup management = more conversions
One thing that I LOVE about Elementor is the ease with which it creates and manages pop-ups. The data is clear: pop-ups drive conversions. Conversions (sign-ups to the LIFT Community) are the number one goal of the site. So designing and managing pop-ups well was a major need for this design. Check out this sweet pop-up I built with Elementor for the LIFT site. We’ve already had more than 150 signups through this pop-up since the site went live a month and a half ago!
Graphic Design
I built several key graphic elements for the site, and used Elementor’s nifty parallax effect abilities to give them some life: you’ll notice that the LIFT hot-air balloons on the home page rise as you scroll, for instance. On the semi-hidden LIFT 2.0 concept note section of the site, I signaled the vision of a transformation from an analog LIFT to a fully digital-native LIFT by shifting from balloons to rockets:
I think the entire site plays together very nicely. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop me a line on the contact page.
Louis Wertz 