Indigov website redesign
Transforming a static company website into a lead-generating tool
Summary
Indigov underwent a major rebranding and needed a new website and content management system to reflect its identity, product offerings, and attract new customers. As an Associate Content Strategist, I collaborated on a cross-functional team to help transform Indigov’s current static company website into an award winning, lead-generating tool.
Intro
Indigov is a government communications platform dedicated to advancing the future of representative democracy. Indigov helps elected officials and agencies more meaningfully engage with the public.
Challenge
While Indigov’s original website was straightforward and worked as a solution early on, there were several areas of improvement:
Difficult to update and maintain
-
Since the site was statically generated, even small content changes required engineering support
-
Limited opportunities to showcase new product features
Not reflective of company’s vision and growth
-
No sense of how broad client base was and how it was expanding
-
Unclear messaging on why Indigov’s products mattered
Outdated branding
-
Indigov underwent a major rebranding and the old website no longer reflected this new identity
Screenshots of Indigov’s original website
Goals
The main goals I wanted to achieve were:
Improve the content editing experience
-
Make it easy for content editors to create and update content without engineering help
-
Build a sustainable process to maintain and add content
Design scalable content
-
Develop content blocks that could be reused for multiple purposes
-
Build out flexible templates so we could more efficiently highlight key product features, company updates, and job opportunities
How I helped
Content modeling
Mapping out the types of content the site needed and how they fit together
As our Design Director shaped each page layout, I planned how the content would be organized and managed behind the scenes. I broke pages into reusable content blocks—like headings, images, and calls to action—and mapped out how those fields related to one another. This helped us:
-
Reduce duplication
-
Keep content consistent
-
Make future updates easier
Content model of a blog post broken down by different components and their relationships to one another
Content management setup
Building an intuitive content editor experience
I worked closely with our Senior Engineer to create a scalable and intuitive CMS in Strapi.
While building out content models, I focused on:
-
Prioritizing the editor experience by grouping related fields logically
-
Reducing redundancy with reusable blocks (like metadata sections)
-
Using flexible content areas that allowed for different layouts without needing new templates each time
I also did the following to support long-term content quality and governance:
What a content editor would see in the CMS when creating a blog post
Usability testing
Observing how content editors navigated the new CMS
I populated the CMS with sample content and tested with content editors to identify any usability gaps. I then adjusted field placements and labels based on their feedback. For example, an editor was confused by where a featured image would display for a blog post, so I added an helper text to clarify.
Side by side comparison of public facing website content and CMS editor
Content migration
Auditing and moving content to the new website
Once the CMS was mostly set up, I created a content matrix to capture the remaining content on the original website. I then set up 1-on-1s with leadership to review their respective web pages.
The matrix helped us audit not just what to migrate but also what to cut, consolidate, or rewrite. This process ensured the new website only reflected our most current vision and messaging.
Sample content matrix to help content migration needs and review status
Content governance
Sustaining future content updates
Since a key goal of this project was to make content creation and updates easier for editors, I developed a governance process for long-term consistency. With the new CMS setup and governance process, content editors could now publish independently, cutting turnaround time from days to minutes.
The process outlined key stakeholders, approval workflows, and specific use cases
Results
From a static site to a lead-generating tool
Indigov’s new website boasted a more accurate reflection of its brand and product strategy
Our content editors gave positive feedback on how easy and intuitive the authoring experience was in the new CMS. Because of the scalable structure I implemented, the site remained easy to update long after the launch, supporting continual Indigov’s growth.
As a bonus, the new website won several publicly voted awards from the 2022 CSS Design Awards.
Takeaways
I enjoyed this project and its whirlwind of challenges. I learned so many new skills during the process — from deploying code changes to finagling Figma files. From the process, I had a few takeaways:
Gather user needs early on
Doing user interviews at the beginning of the project would have helped me better understand content pain points and consolidate feature requests more efficiently. For example, site editors later expressed a desire for a “Preview” feature to see unpublished content.
Consider content operations down the line
If I had more time, I would have liked to consider how to implement granular user permissions. As the company scales, more team members will need access to the site editor, some of whom may only need limited access.
Capture before and after stats
One major item I would have liked to do was capture baseline stats, such as number of visitors on the old site, to compare with the new version. I would have also liked to measure the amount of time it took for changes to be made on the old site versus the new.