NC Rural Center
Website
One of the agency’s long-standing clients. Beginning with the identity, the relationship lasted over 7 years of designing, developing, strategizing, and supporting the non-profit to meet its mission by Improving the quality of life of rural North Carolinians.
This latest iteration was to design and develop the website to be easily updated and managed by the NCRC teams. Design phases included IA, UX/UI, and wiremapping where sitemap and wireframes are blended together to enable a fluid timeline, conversations, and quicker consensus with the leadership team.
The Client
The NC Rural Center’s mission is to develop, promote, and implement sound economic strategies to improve the quality of life of rural North Carolinians.
Operating with the core belief that our rural communities have inherent cultural value and are vital to the overall economic health of our state, recognizing that the changing landscape of rural North Carolina brings with it significant challenges also believing in the resiliency of our state’s rural people and their dedicated stewardship of the communities they call home.
The organization serves 78 rural counties in NC, focusing on individuals with low to moderate incomes and communities with limited resources.
NCRC is committed to its success and the success of the communities we serve by:
- Striving for Excellence
- Promoting Authentic Leadership
- Leading with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Delivering Meaningful and Measurable Impact
Design
The approach was to revitalize the design by making it easier to manage, establishing a systematic structure for components, creating a comprehensive inventory of components to build, integrating the brand more effectively across the site, clarifying the typographic hierarchy, modernizing the overall look and feel, and focusing on more engaging, streamlined content on the homepage.
Information Architecture
The client team kick-off meeting provided clarity on pain points, visitor activity and new goals for the homepage:
Discovery
- Recommendations on site strucure and content organization:
- content to be more timely, dynamic, informative and inviting
- Integrate one signin to manage 4 organizational sites.
- Refresh the brand use across the site.
- Inegrate a easier and undersatnable page builder.
- Easy to navigate
- Empower client teams to update site.
- To be the resource for the NC rural community.
- Spanish translation
78 Rural Counties
78 rural counties in NC, focusing on individuals with low to moderate incomes and communities with limited resources.
Homepage
Setting the visual aesthetic direction PT Sans with the right qualities: the optimal ratio between the x-height and the stroke width, a wider through bar on the lowercase “t”, the “8” and the uppercase “B”, capital “I” with the lowercase “l” and the “1”, lowercase “i” and the uppercase “I” at smaller screen sizes, a two-tiered lowercase “a” helps differentiate it from the lowercase “o” and color …. evaluating color contrast, explored the use of color, imagery, and data visualizations.
