MML
Website
The Michigan Municipal League website hadn’t been redesigned for fifteen plus years. It was regularly updated by a handful of people, but there was no one that was truly in charge of design or strategy. As a result: branding and design was out of date, there was loads of outdated and incorrect information, links and images were broken. With tens of thousands of files and thousands of pages, it had become a running joke around the company, it was a mess. I was part of the team that organized the old content, designed a new website, and built it on a new platform.
Home Page
MML is a small non profit that does a lot; from events, to insurance, to advocacy, to planning. They’ve amassed a mountain of reference over 125 years, and are constantly coming up with new information and programs to share. I worked with departments across the organization to come up with a good way to organize that information in a way that would be most helpful to the membership. We used that outline to create the main navigation of this site, and determine what was most important to feature on the homepage. As a result, the homepage became a sort of news page for the organization, featuring the most important updates from each department.
Staff Page
The staff page used to be a table that listed the names and contact of all staff, but only included headshots and bios for executives and department heads. It wasn’t very interesting to look at, not inclusive of all staff, and didn’t reflect the personality of the organization.
The new page has a collage of photos at the top of the page that is meant to showcase some personality at MML. The staff are very proud of the culture they’ve developed, and this felt like the perfect chance to show off some of the fun they have around the office and at events. Next, I added a filter and search function to make the list more user friendly. Taking photos and writing bios for everyone on staff was a big undertaking, but we thought it would go a long way to make everyone feel valued. I worked with a photographer and writers on staff to tackle the tasks. To add a touch of whimsy, I replaced the background of each photo with branded line art and used that as a hover state.
Advocacy Page
After a few rounds of development, I was building new pages and maintaining the website without the help of an agency. I built this page for a program that the Advocacy department created. It was a complicated, brand new program that required action from MML membership, so I decided it deserved its own page rather than being tagged onto an existing page. I visually broke the information into digestible pieces to make the message and call to action as clear as possible.