Human Rights Law Firm Website

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CLIENT TYPE: Nonprofit, international human rights law firm

ROLES: Visual design, UX, IxD, digital strategy, account management, project management

AGENCY: Media Cause

DURATION: 9 months

LAUNCHED: Spring 2016

UX, SEO joins forces for deep CJA redesign

Balancing user-centered design with data-driven SEO strategy for the international human rights law firm

See it live

The first challenge in the cja.org redesign involved migrating the nearly decade-old content on cja.org from the outdated AMP platform onto WordPress.

WordPress was chosen to ensure the nonprofit client for whom it was being created could easily continue to operate and grow the site in-house after project completion.

The site started out with over 1,000 pages, most of which had to be reorganized on the backend post-migration, as the original hierarchy was dismantled during migration.

The next major challenge was balancing SEO goals with UX needs – especially in establishing the homepage structure and the first impression – due to the sensitive nature of CJA’s work. Fortunately, I worked with an excellent SEO specialist who understood the value of balancing SEO with UX.

The new sitemap allowed for the development of a section dedicated exclusively to the main types of human rights violations fought by the legal team.

This approach widened the net for visitors who may end up at CJA by search for specific HR issues. However, by linking to these pages from the homepage, we were forced to balance the emotional impact of emotionally charged language (e.g. “Sexual Violence” and “Genocide”) with visual that were still emotionally engaging, but not inherently negative.

For this reason, the homepage uses a square photo rotator on the left of the section showing links to SEO-minded pages. The aim is to create access points for various issues, without emotionally overwhelming users.