National Housing Organization Redesigning its Web Site

Rebuilding Together

Rebuilding Together is the nation's leading nonprofit organization working to preserve affordable homeownership and revitalize neighborhoods. We provide 10,000 extensive rehabilitation and modification projects per year for those in need - at no cost to those served. Every year Rebuilding Together affiliates in America's largest cities and smallest towns - with the help of everyday citizen volunteers, skilled trades people, the support of local business and major corporate partners - make life considerably better for thousands of low-income homeowners and the communities in which they live . Rebuilding Together has programs dedicated to energy efficiency, veteran's housing, aging in place and Gulf Coast reconstruction.

Rebuilding Together works with Corporate Partners, Individual Donors, Skilled Trades Organizations, Government and Non-Government Agencies, our Affiliate Network and Grass-roots/community volunteers. The landing page for the site should welcome all, and then the three additional pages should reflect the interests of 1) Corporate Partners, Media, and other larger organizations 2) our Affiliate Network and 3) Individuals interested in information or making a donation.

The primary audiences are the Corporate Partners and Individual Donors, who will expect to see a sophisticated, clean site with regular updates and fresh content (including photos and videos) that highlights their participation on a rotating basis.

At the same time, the site should be simple to navigate, true to our brand, and intuitive for our Affiliate Network, Skilled Trades Partners, and Volunteer Groups

Start with our logo, branding, color scheme. Simple, elegant and 2.0, but not necessarily traditional.

Please incorporate our brand color palette; Black, Pantone 368 (web#62bd19), Pantone 541 (web #003c79), Pantone 143 (web #efaa22), Pantone 1795 (web #d81f2a) and Pantone 639 (web #009acf).

A video player on the home page is must, but should not be overwhelming nor overshadow any other piece of the design.

We will be using the http://www.YourMembership.com membership management software as the main CMS for our website, with an API linkup to Donor software that will be functionally separate but aesthetically linked to the main website.

YourMembership restricts us to a set of common template choices: http://www.yourmembership.com/brand…ayouts.asp, so the design will require some innovation in pushing but not breaking boundaries.

From a common landing page we expect different audiences to be able to navigate quickly to the content specific to them.

News and updates are a must, probably a rotator like on our current site and a small updating headlines/blog section. Two or three call to action buttons that are attention grabbing (as on http://liveunited.org ) as well as links to social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS, or similar).

The design of the landing page should stand out, but be something we can carry through in all subpages at least in the overall feel.

4

Homepage

-Navigation to About Us, Sponsors, Affiliate Login, Events

-Highlighted buttons to Donate, Volunteer, Learn More

-News/Blog Section

-Top stories Rotater

-Sponsor Rotater

-Social Media Links (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, RSS)

Corporate Partner and Media Homepage

-Sponsor Recognition Area (logos, impact, press, etc)

-Benefits of Partnership

-Links to Photos, Videos, Logos, News Releases, etc for quick media grabs

-Social Media Links (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, RSS)

Affiliate Homepage

-Buttons for Affiliate Essentials, Get Connected, Resource Library, Training

-Internal News/Blog

-Calendar of Events

-Photo Gallery

-Social Media Links (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, RSS)

Individual Homepage

-Focus on About Us, Housing and Community Revitalization, Finding an Affiliate or Other Resources near you, etc

-Strong call for Individual Giving

Looking for ideas we haven't even considered yet. Overall themes should be consistent, but not identical. All above are guidelines, not rules. Priorities are corporate and individual giving, media friendly, intuitive, clean interface, showing who we are more than telling who we are.

http://www.rebuildingtogether.org It is a relatively clean design, but the navigation is cluttered and not intuitive. The rotator is nice, but much of the site looks tacked together a little at a time instead of like it's a seamless whole.

Current Affiliate website: affiliates.rebuildingtogether.org Username: test, Password: test

For sample images, there are some at facebook.com/rebuildingtogether

http://liveunited.org The landing page is strong, but then the subpages go back to looking clean, but out of date.

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/gall…-websites/ has a lot of nice non-profit designs.