Chicago Community Trust: Neighborhoods 2015

The Chicago Community Trust’s (CCT) main website had recently undergone a major redesign, but important data from the organization’s Chicago Neighborhoods 2015 project did not receive a proper facelift. While the data existed on the updated CCT website, it was difficult to navigate and visually unimpressive. CCT faced an important deadline when the Chicago Mayor’s Office announced plans for a neighborhood revitalization project based on CCT’s data. The potential increase in traffic meant visitors to the site would need a better experience, so CCT stakeholders decided to create a microsite to house the results of the neighborhood study.

Graphic depicting the website's transformation.
The Chicago Neighborhoods website gets a proper facelift.

We invited CCT team members to our office for a discovery workshop that gave us important background information on the data and its intended audiences. This informed the website’s design and user experience as well as written content, which we improved for clarity, grammatical accuracy, and keyword use. At the end of a full-day working session we had already created a working prototype of the microsite in WordPress.

High-fidelity wireframe examples
Examples of higher fidelity wireframes initially sketched in a discovery workshop.

We used the rest of our timeline to finish the WordPress development, fine-tune the design, and transfer data and graphics from the old website to the new microsite. In all, it took us two weeks to plan, design, code, and launch the microsite—well within CCT’s launch deadline.

Visual elements used in the website redesign.
This is an array of the various style treatments used for the redesign.