Skills Canada Alberta Unveils New Site
Skills Canada is an organization known nation-wide for its efforts to promote careers in the skilled trades to teens and young adults. Every year, students from across the country participate in local, provincial, and national competitions that teach and test the skills required to work in the trades.
As competition categories began to span a larger number of disciplines, the Alberta branch of the organization began to feel the impact on their website. It became bogged down with information and was overwhelming to navigate. There were so many layers of information – regional, provincial, and national events; trade categories; special events; teacher and parent information – that sorting through it all became frustrating. It became a tangled web of news, registration forms, and event listings that required far too much clicking and drilling in to find what you needed.
We teamed up with our friends at Fission Media to rebuild the Skills Canada Alberta website to better handle large amounts of information. The biggest challenge was to find a way to organize all of the information so that none of it would require more than a couple clicks of the mouse to get to, making it easier for all users.
Most of the organization and navigation problems were solved by categorizing each event listing by location, event level (i.e. regional or provincial), as well as by discipline (e.g. welding, baking, auto body repair). This was especially important because the site has many audiences: competitors ranging in age from junior high to college, teachers, parents, volunteers, and alumni. Each type of site visitor can access the site from whatever path suits them. If you’re a teacher from Vegreville who is interested in registering a student for a welding competition, you can browse through the welding events, or look at all of the event listing for Vegreville, or you can head straight to the Teachers & Instructors menu if you already know what event you want to register for. If you’re a student from Calgary trying to find a competition you’d be interested in, you can simply browse by Calgary’s regional events, or you can browse by discipline to get a detailed description of each trade. No matter who you are or what you’re looking, there is an easy way to find it.
The site still contains a great deal of information, but streamlining and proper categorization have made it simple to navigate and easy to find the exact information you’re looking for. Is your website built to accommodate growth? If you need advice on how to organize and categorize your website, give us a call!
Posted by Ramona on January 27, 2012 in clients
Research Leads the Development of Gecan’s New Site
We recently developed a new website for Gecan, an asphalt lab located in Acheson, AB. Gecan specializes in a number of asphalt-related services, including testing, mix design, blending, and formulation. Over the last few years their business and facilities have seen substantial growth, garnering a reputation as an industry leader with facilities and a knowledge base that go unparalleled by their peers. As is common with companies that grow at a rapid rate, Gecan’s website was simply unable to keep up.
Gecan’s staff are some of the most knowledgable people we’ve ever met. Their industry is a complicated one, but they know it inside and out. Their existing website, however, was very basic and did not reflect the level of expertise and knowledge that the team holds. Over the course of a number of months we studied everything we could about their industry, including the equipment found in their labs, the services they provide, and what their clients would be looking for in their site. After we were through with our meetings, the team at Gecan graciously lent us a library’s worth of books and manuals for further research, including a massive volume affectionately known around the lab as the “asphalt bible.”
The result of all of this research is a deceptively simple website. The content is divided into carefully thought out sections, so as to avoid any page being too heavy or confusing. To further relieve the site of complex, technical explanations, we used photographs to showcase the quality and quantity of Gecan’s machinery and the capabilities of their labs. We also added a glossary so that if a client still finds the information to be too complicated, he or she can look up the definitions of terms for clarification.
It was also important that we streamline some administrative processes to save time and energy for both the staff and customers of Gecan. A materials testing request form was added to the site to eliminate the need to handle requests and quotes over the phone. This means that staff don’t have to go back and forth between the phone and other tasks as often, and it also makes the test request process easier on customers because they can submit requests on their own time, without having to make phone calls or create paperwork.
Research is always a key part of our process, but sometimes it’s necessary to invest a little extra time and energy into it. In order to make a complex subject simple for others to understand, you first have to have a thorough understanding of it. Thanks to this approach, Gecan now has a site that reflects their status as leaders in the asphalt industry.
Are you taking the time to get to know your clients’ industries? If you’d like to discuss the benefits of industry research, give us a call. We’d love to share some ideas.
Posted by Ramona on January 22, 2012 in clients