In this presentation, Evonne Young and Robin Sidel walk through the redesign process for the Kaiser Family Foundation website and explain how the organization brought 20-years of data in WordPress. Topics covered: content migration, development of faceted search, information architecture,

1. REDESIGNING KFF.ORG
Battle Entropy

2. Where We Started
What was happening in 2003?
• Facebook was a college
network.
• MySpace & Friendster were
cool.
• No Twitter.
• No YouTube.
• Palm Pilots and
Blackberries; no
smartphones.
• Flash was big.
And here’s where we landed: www.kff.org

3. Redesign Goals
• Create a more cohesive web presence by consolidating
websites.
• Create an intuitive site architecture to reflect how users
search and user information.
• Improve search.
• Make content more accessible on a variety of devices.
• Streamline CMSs and improve efficiency and ease of posting
content.

4. The Kaiser Family of Sites

5. The Process: In the Beginning
• Engaged staff from the beginning and throughout the
process.
• Defined goals.
• Got buy-in from senior management and our board and
stayed in touch with them throughout the process.
• Developed comprehensive RFP, selecting firms that specialize
in a variety of CMSs.

6. Why WordPress?
20 minutes later…
Matt Mullenweg:
Drew Altman:
We’re starting to
redesign our website.
Here, check out how
your home page
would look in
WordPress.

7. Why We Really Chose WordPress
• Kff.org is a deep, complex site. Why not Drupal?
– Alley Interactive first pitched Drupal.
– Concerns about ease-of-use and costly and labor-intensive upgrading.
• WordPress’ intuitive backend.
• Beginning to see other enterprise-wide sites developed on
WordPress.
• Ability to use plugins: Slideshare and Verite.
• Open source environment would allow us freedom to develop
new features quickly and at low-cost.

8. Moving Mountains (of data): Prepping for the Migration
• Evaluate content types
– We ended up with 30+ custom content types
• Evaluate what historical content to migrate
– We ended up migrating 90% of content
• Convened an organization-wide taxonomy task force
– Reorganized content for topic-based website
– Resulted in 10 topics, 150 site-wide tags, plus 2 additional taxonomies
• Planned for a more visual website
– “Let Data Tell the Story”
– Convened task force to research new ways to visualize our data
– Prepped for ability to feature data graphics in key places on new site

9. Lessons Learned
• Content migration was an iterative process.
• It’s never too early to clean up your current site and remove content that’s no
longer useful. (This will take longer than you think.)
• Don’t underestimate the amount of time a successful migration will take.
• Prepare for a period of dual entry.

10. Designing for Digital First Strategy
• Design needed to account for how to present 100+ page reports
online and present reports with heavy use of charts/slides.
• Make fact sheets easy to read, easy for search engines to discover
content and easy to update.
• Present large amounts of data.
• Highlight the stable of Kaiser’s slides.
• Give graphics & interactives more visibility.

11. Search
• Alley Interactive worked with VIP to develop for kff.org the first
faceted search for elastic search.
• Ability for users to refine by types of content, tags and topics.
• Still user testing.

12. Join the Battle
Coming This Month to a
Computer, Tablet, or Phone near you!
Questions?