Winter Sports Clinic Site Redesign
The National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic is the world leader in rehabilitation.
The National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic is the world leader in rehabilitation.
Participating Veterans experience "Miracles on a Mountainside" as they are provided with training in adaptive Alpine and Nordic skiing, sled hockey, scuba diving, rock wall climbing, and a number of other adaptive activities, sports, and education.
The clinic, which began in 1987 with 90 participants, has grown to assist nearly 400 profoundly disabled veterans.
The website was created over 10 years ago with no major visual update, and its age was showing. With the organization migrating this site to a new content management system, this was a good time to rethink the site. This process started with rethinking the content structure. Thinking through clear calls to action on all pages, and driving the user to get involved with the clinic through volunteering, participating, or donating.
1. Modern Coat of Paint
Bring the look and feel into the last few years.
2. Restructure Content
Focus on core user groups: participant, volunteer, sponsor, and donor. Drive user flow to facilitate each of their needs/wants.
3. New CMS Migration
Build the site into the contact management of choice within the organization.
When visitors come to the site they can see what appears to be a legacy site. The site was initially built more than 10 years ago, and outside of content changes, the structure has remained relatively the same.
Once the content restructure was complete, a mood board was created. Since the event largely revolved around winter mountain activities, looking through mountain landscapes and typography textures started the design process.
The existing site didn't expand beyond the red and blue colors in the logo. I added a few different color options, as well as the default black and white colors.
When thinking through the events the clinic participants would go through, I looked for patterns and images that would highlight thinking you could find winter mountain settings.
What made sense was straight and curvy patterns, like what you might find on a ski slope. Topographic map patterns, like what you would find on a mountain map. As well as mountain range photos with pine trees, as well as ski slope pictures.
With this program being a collaboration between the Veterans Affairs and the Disabled American Veterans, font styles don't match. The solution was to pick and choose from each site, so for headings the Bitter font was used which is from the VA site, and Roboto was the choice for the body font which is used on the DAV website.
Icons were sourced from a variety of sources to drive home the programs of the event.
A sampling of the reusable components used across the site.
Working off the set of components, the pages came together fitting within the brand guidelines and fulfilling the stated goals.
1. Updated Design
Users will get a sense that this program is still active and thriving when they see the site is refreshed with a modern interface.
2. User Flow Improvements
Users will find what they need faster, equaling more participants/volunteers and sponsorships/donations.
3. Content Management Happiness
Content managers will work with the CMS that they are used to using with most of our other DAV-managed websites.
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