About the Organization
The Great Bear Initiative Society, also known as Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative (CFN), is an alliance of First Nations on the North Pacific Coast. Their goal is to restore sustainable resource management practices to protect ecosystems, and improve the quality of life for coastal communities.
Objectives
- Emphasize a people-first approach by emphasizing individual and community stories
- Improve site architecture and navigation to improve access to content
- Deepen Communities content to provide more information and insight into the individual communities that make up the alliance
- Reorganize and expand the current blog to improve storytelling opportunities, engagement, and SEO
- Build on SEO foundations to increase search engine traffic and drive future growth
- Implement a fully responsive solution backed by WordPress CMS
Prototyping
Coastal First Nations does incredibly impactful work that benefits the people, animals, waters, and lands of BC’s western coast. They needed a new website to better showcase their economic and cultural initiatives, and amplify stories from within their communities.
The old CFN website had confusing menus, and the backend consisted of many standalone pages. The goal of our new information architecture and UX designs was to create more post types and logical content relationships, supported by a system of taxonomies. This automates the work of ensuring that the latest content always appears on relevant pages, while empowering visitors to browse by community or initiative.
Style
CFN already had a lot of really great content. Their photos and videos are particularly striking, and they wanted to take more of an editorial approach with the new site, to utilize more visual content. We worked with their team to add more depth to their earthy, natural colour palette, and incorporate big, bold imagery in the new page designs.
Bringing it All Together
The new Coastal First Nations website is beautiful to look at, but also easy to browse and search. It highlights their leadership and expertise, and positions the site as a wealth of educational resources. In the first month post-launch the site saw increased search traffic and engagement. And the site is built on our low-code site builder, Refoundry, making it significantly faster and easier for their team to manage content and menus.
Built by Refoundry
Refoundry is a low-code site builder plugin created by Forge and Smith’s owner, Shawn Johnston, and our team of engineers. We’ve been building all of our websites on it since late 2022. It empowers our clients with total creative freedom in WordPress, and the ability to more easily grow and scale their sites.
See the Finished Site
Go explore the full website, then come back to discover more of our work!
