YMCA Ocean Community
Designing A Community Website & Information Architecture For A Large Local branch Of YMCA Locations
The Development
Preparations
This client was actually referred to my agency based on a previous YMCA development that my company had taken on, so a good amount of information about their primary needs and demographics were already available to us. I went ahead and reviewed their primary KPI’s that we had setup previously, and reviewed the initial content strategy to see if there were any transferrable details.
User Research
Based on the existing website I could see that users were often confused, the behavior map didn’t tell a story for their ideal users. This often left users at dead ends, or finding themselves on pages that had very little value. The client’s ideal user were parents / young families usually within their early to mid 30’s, as well as older users interested in trying new actives.
The Design
The design of this website was purposefully made simple, the reasoning for this was that we were anticipating users outside of web designers updating the site. A cleaner environment with pre-made libraries oh elements to use allowed their staff to continue to make updates without compromising the design. There were very high restrictions on the overall branding elements based on the well established brand guidelines of the YMCA.
Key Takeaways
Program Signups
One of the main goals of this new development was increasing program signups. With the new development we quick-linked their CTA’s on specific pages that directly lead to a 13% increase in signups and engagement around programs.
Event Registration
Events at the YMCA Ocean Community saw a 8.5% increase in registration directly after site launch. We promoted events more promptly throughout the site which gave users multiple chances to engage throughout the site.
Increased Traffic
While developing this site, we incorporated some basic SEO into the backend that focused on branding, locations, and services that the YMCA offered. This resulted in their keywords increasing by roughly 20% and the site experienced a 15% increase in traffic in total
Membership Signups
Memberships that initiated on the site increased from 9% after site launched, although memberships were not able to be tracked in their own software. We could determine via analytics how many members started out on the website, and then transferred to their signup process and completed a contact form.
Project Summery
Overall this project was a ton of fun, I do wish that their membership platform Daxco was a tad more accessible. The majority of YMCA’s rely on this software that has poor embeddability, and often causes unnecessary vulnerabilities. The site design was super clean, and the client was overall very happy which made this project a success.
