Digital Fuel has finished a complete site overhaul for non-profit Orthodox Answers.  OA engaged us to take the old classic ASP web site, which hadn’t received much attention recently, and re-implement the site in ASP.Net with a new site design.

Digital Fuel, working from our offices in Decatur, IL, analyzed the OA web site and determined that the content rich web site was poorly displaying that content, and did not focus web site viewers into the most important areas and activities.  The web site had various bugs and security flaws.  The navigation was largely javascript based, which caused it to be picked up badly by search engines.  Many search engine optimizations needed to be put in place, and the site design was starting to look a bit dated.

Orthodox Answers

The new and improved site.

We took on the web site by determining, with the site owner, what goals the site should be focused on, and then outlined a series of steps intended to bring those goals to the forefront.  We determined that the top goals were to bring the important content more to the fore front, and to incorporate social media into the web site.  To support that we would rebuild the web site in ASP.Net, and redesign entire look.  We would also analyze the site content and structure to determine what changes needed to be made in order to help the search engine rankings and build additional audience for Orthodox Answers.

In discussions with the site owner we determined that a multi-phase roll out would be best, with the first phase being a feature-for-feature rebuild of the web site into a new ASP.Net code base, building in a custom content management system that allowed for all site pages to be managed via a web based application, rather than hard coded pages, and downloading and reuploading database files.

In the second phase we redesigned the site to feature a simplified site navigation, more prominent content roles, and social media features.  The new site structure was designed to be search engine friendly, and urls were simplified.

Over the final weeks of the project we kept a close watch on various site analytics tools, and by the end of the project we had managed to double over all site traffic and visits, and had built a sizable twitter following for the site.  We continue to maintain content management relationships with Orthodox Answers, and are working on additional phases of work.