Ethical Society of Saint Louis

Some time ago the Ethical Society of Saint Louis approached us with a need to consolidate their web presence as well as update their look.
They'd recently updated their logo and wanted a website that matched the modernity of this new mark. They also wanted a website that made it easier for users to find out more information about their events, which are the cornerstone of their institution. And ultimately, they needed a website that they could manage on their own.

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DATE: The new site was completed in the spring of 2017, and was launched in July of 2017.

ROLE: With artistic direction from Nien Studios, we were responsible for strategizing on architecture, designing a general content template, establishing a theme, and migrating content.

URL: You can view the website and learn about the events of The Ethical Society of Saint Louis at ethicalstl.org.

CLIENT: The Ethical Society of Saint Louis is a Humanist congregation where people come together to explore questions of life.

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A Focus on Events

The Ethical Society of Saint Louis has a variety of events geared towards very different audiences. In an effort to give them the power to manage that and add some organization, we leveraged The Events Calendar. This plugin has an intuitive interface that allows events to be organized by category, which is just what was needed.

Project Gallery

Once again with worked with Nien Studios to provide art direction and general designs. Because we were working to provide one general template that could be repurposed throughout the site, Robert created a beautiful design as always, but he was extra diligent in his thinking about the flow of elements.

Education

With the intent of having multiple folks manage the site and its content, we set up a series of training sessions to give tutorials on the site's usage to the principle editors. We broke these sessions up into two-hour chunks so we didn't overload a single session. And because we are in California and they are in Missouri, we utilized Google Hangouts to facilitate screen shares and fielding questions from the team.

Budget and Timeline

Two requests The Ethical Society of Saint Louis had for us related to budget and timeline. Being an entity that is governed by a board they knew their budget was going to be inflexible. We needed to be able to work with them and sometimes come up with creative solutions to be able to provide them with everything they needed without any overages. We strive for this with every project, but here it was particularly important.

Also because of the nature of their entity, they knew that feedback and approval cycles were going to be very slow. And they needed us to be able to work at their pace.

In both cases we were able to collaborate with them easily.

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Migration and Consolidation

When we met the folks from The Ethical Society of Saint Louis, they had a blog on WordPress, but the rest of their content was on a different platform. One of our jobs was to bring all that data into a single WordPress environment and allow them to move forward from there. With some data mapping and testing we were able to pull all of the correct information into the new website.

Conclusion...

Working with the team at The Ethical Society of Saint Louis was a real treat. Everyone was committed to the end goal and worked well to get there. They asked great questions and were very clear on what their needs were for the site.

Having the challenge of balancing their goals with their budget was a good exercise for us. We are very proud of what we provided for the client and the client was extremely happy with what they received.

 

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Tell Us About Your Project!
matthew-hile
Our new website looks beautiful, runs quickly, has useful new features, and is appealing to visitors.
 
We went to Pixel Jar with a set of specifications and ideas about what we wanted. They built on our specifications and improved on our ideas. After looking at numerous proposals from other companies, Pixel Jar’s was the first that excited all of the members of our team. 
 
The development experience was great!  Design iterations prompted thoughtful discussions on both sides about the advantages and disadvantages of each layout. We delighted in rapid responses to our (many!) questions and felt assured by Pixel Jar’s quick fixes when we discovered issues during the review and test period.
 
Now that the site has been live for a while we really appreciate the tools that Pixel Jar chose for development, particularly Beaver Builder Pro which made it easy for us to add features to our pages and enhance our user’ experience.

Matthew Hile

Digital Director at The Ethical Society of Saint Louis