PSS WordPress Website

For nearly 50 years Parent Support Services Society’s (PSS) mission has been to protect the safety and wellbeing of children and promote the health of all families in all their diversity in British Columbia. By partnering with communities and those in a parenting role, they can provide support, advocacy, education, research, and resources.

I worked in partnership with Sea to Sky Web Solution (SSWS) on this project. I did all the design and content planning and SSWS did all the development.

Problem:
The PSS website was functionally broken. Some of the plugins were not working anymore and they had not been able to update the content of their website in a while. This lead to a lack of organization and purpose in their content and made it difficult to access all the wonderful resources they provided. Their old website theme was also not doing them any favours. The center paragraph in a block of colour is a design that works well for a lot of sites that only needed to present a small about of information at a time. But PSS site is FULL of very useful information and having such large spacing around the texts, as well as everything being center-aligned, made each page incredibly long and hard to read.

Solution:
Content plan! Create new user workflows and organize the content into those workflows. Update the formatting so that it was easier to read and easier to add new information in the future. Refresh the brand by adding some new colours and graphics. Streamline functionality and create a new way of posting events and presenting events.

BEFORE

In the before screenshots below you can see how long some of the pages were and how the center aligned text formating was making large sections of text quite hard to read.

LOGO BEFORE & AFTER

Before we started on anything we updated the logo. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with their current logo, it just needed a little extra polish and formatting. We added some padding the circle changed some text formating and created a favicon.

STYLE ANALYSIS

Next was the Style Analysis. We analyzed their competition and reviewed what they did well, and what we could do better.

MOOD BOARDS

Next, we created a mood board. The feedback from the first mood board was that we like the general vibe, but felt the colours need to be boosted. We end up using the mood board on the far right with the most saturated colour pallet.

MOCKUPS

One of the features we added was promoting that they were able to service people in multiple languages. Up until now, this feature was not highlighted well on their website, so we made a point of clearly displaying it and making it easier for people to read in that particular language.

CONTENT PLANNING

Once the branding was established we went back to the content planning phase to make sure all our content would fit into our new formatting and templates. We focused on optimizing our workflows for each user. Making sure information was easy to read and access. While leaving room to add new content in the future. Below is just a snapshot of some of the documents we used for content planning. Each page below corresponds to its own page on the websites.

PEOPLE VECTORS

The last aspect of the design phase was creating these people vectors. We tried looking for high quality images of BIPOC families that represented PSS members but found very few useable photos. In the mood board phase, we talked about using vector graphics to represent some of the diversity we couldn’t find in photos. However, we found a lack of representation even in the vectors. There were virtually no vectors of Indigenous people, and what I could find was mostly offensive caricatures, and there were very few vectors that showed bodies of all shapes and sizes. So we bought a vector pack of base people and then created new people to fit our demographics. Some of the vectors we created were all the Indigenous people, Elderly people in ethnics other than white and single Dad’s.

WEBSITE

Once all the design and content planning was done it was time to hand all these assets off to Sea to Sky Web Solution (SSWS) and their team. Use the link below to check out what a great job Giorgio and his team did implement my designs.

PROJECT COMPLETED: NOVEMBER 2021

WHAT THE CLIENT HAD TO SAY

It was a pleasure to work with Kelsey on our non-profit’s website redesign project. Our new site is much more accessible, organised, and user friendly thanks to her expertise – with an updated sitemap, layout, and look, along with new graphic assets she created for us along the way. With such a big project, it was wonderful how Kelsey was consistently communicating and actively listening to our feedback. She took time to understand our organisation and connect with us, which really shows in the final result. Thank you so much for helping us bring our vision to life!

JACOB HUANG
Communications (Parent Support Services Society of BC)

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