The Glenn Gould Foundation administers Canada’s pre-eminent prize for artistic excellence and innovation, produces a stand-out podcast of conversations with some amazing people, and serves as a marker of sorts to trace and commemorate the pianist, broadcaster and innovator himself.
They’ve been at it a while and, like so many other websites, have been producing a steady stream of content. Without looking back.
And where some might applaud their audacity, adventurous spirit and forward-facing outlook, the Google search index and their visitors would not.
Content inventory and audit
So first up on the agenda was a content inventory and audit. The foundation has done some amazing stuff over the years: events, concerts, street performance, the list goes on. Plus they’ve documented the life of one of Canada’s most celebrated musicians and the work of artists Gould has inspired.
I enjoyed reading through all these pieces and learned a lot about all things Gould. The site has some great content.
So the challenge was finding a way to keep the site’s content focussed on its mission, and findable without sacrificing all the gems buried in the depths of the WordPress database.
It took a strong and involved collaboration with and among foundation staff to get there. And I think it’s fair to say we did — down to about 100 pages from more than four times that many. Yet they got to keep the quirky bits, the stories, and the creative bits.
The design
The site needed a stronger visual hierarchy to allow the Foundation to draw attention to its current priorities and pre-eminent events. Its branding and colour scheme needed adjustment and it needed a clean, minimal and professional look commensurate with its stature.
As ever, the main design goal was to get out of the way and let the content shine through.
The engineering
The project sponsors were particularly frustrated by the former site’s back end which used a commercial page builder. These make it possible to turn every page into a spectacular wedding cake, but add needless complexity to the routine posting of site content. The site’s pages had all been built as static entities. So adding a new podcast episode or news item also involved adding a blurb and a link to the new content to both the home page and the content landing page. That had to be changed. And it was.