Barley's Angels Chicago IA overhaul, CMS switch and responsive redesign

When I joined Barley's Angels as a co-organizer in the fall of 2018, one of my first personal initiatives was to redo the website. We inherited a Wordpress site from the original chapter founder that had a messy IA and outdated design that was not responsive nor user-friendly.

Old site issues abound

Old barleysangelschicago.com site

The template was very old with a background design that was a tiled (unofficial) logo. The header was yellow for some reason? The IA was a little scattered and some of the nav titles were needlessly wordy.

The old nav was: About, Barley's Angels In The News, Contact Us, Events Calendar, What Does A Barley's Angel Look Like?

The home page was just a rollup of event listings, like a traditional blog. It was an endless scroll, which I don't like. There wasn't a way to sign up for the newsletter from the home page or a quick way to see our contact info.

Because we were using a free version of Wordpress, there were ads, some of which were really upsetting and one in particular was clickbait about alcoholism- which with a craft beer club's website is just not something you want people to think about or associate yourself with.

Overall it needed to move platforms and it needed a facelift.

Setting up the back end

Step one was transferring the domain. I personally don't like Wordpress and the domain was about to automatically re-up and charge the old co-organizer, so I wanted to get it switched over to a different registrar so I could pay for it. This took a while and I had to contact both Wordpress support (which, by the way, is not real fun) and my preferred domain registrar's live helpdesk chat.

I also needed to choose a new CMS or platform. I decided on Google Sites because I've been using it for a while for my personal site (hello, this one that you are reading now) and I like it for really simple sites like this that don't have too many assets or pages.

Cleaner nav

I knew we needed a clean main nav, so I thought about the top things users want to see when they come to the site:

Info about our organization
Upcoming events and past events
How to contact us

Then I thought about our main goals:

Give users info about us and our events
Get users to sign up for our newsletter

It was easy to settle on the new main nav: About, Events and Contact Us.

Simplified home page

I knew we wanted a link to the newsletter on the home page and in subsequent pages since that's our main way we announce new events and stay in contact with our members.

I also wanted to link directly to the Events page since that's another very important page and when I was just a member it was what I went to the old website for.

I also wanted to feature the About page since that's where we put a lot of the content from the former About, Barley's Angels In The News, and What Does A Barley's Angel Look Like? pages.

I wanted the colors to be really simple, so I chose a very basic color theme from Google Sites that is mostly white, black, gray, and maroon. These are in line with our branding since we use those colors in our newsletter and we have maroon t-shirts.

New barleysangelschicago.com site

After the struggle of getting the domain transferred and redirecting to the new site, which took a lot longer than I had hoped, we were in good shape. It didn't take long to transfer the content and organize everything. I chose to migrate a few of our past events and the upcoming ones and then just link directly to the old site, which is still on Wordpress but is now serving as an archive. I added our contact info and links to sign up for our newsletter contextually in the content.

The new design is clean and simple, responsive, and easy to read. Most of the color comes from the photos, which are from past events and I hope our members will enjoy seeing themselves on the site! Overall, I'm very happy with how it came out and the fact that we're out of Wordpress and into an easy to edit, responsive platform.

See the new site at https://www.barleysangelschicago.com

Google Sites

Report abuse