The Horticulture Centre of the Pacific (HCP), home to the Pacific Horticulture College, is a non-profit that manages a public garden lovingly maintained by volunteers, staff and students. Their goal is to connect people with plants by sharing horticultural knowledge and experiences with everyone.
The Challenge
HCP approached Caorda as their site needed a design refresh and some reorganization. Their existing site was not doing justice to the beautiful gardens and information was not logically organized or easy to find, in particular the wide variety of events and workshops that HCP offers. As a non-profit, it was very important to HCP that the new site be easy to use for their team. They regularly update the site with new content, blog posts and images and need to continue to do so. An existing integration with their CRM system needed to be kept, and the Pacific Horticulture College needed its own section of the site with a slightly different look and feel to the rest of the site to set it apart.
The Solution
Caorda’s web design team went to work creating a series of beautiful new page layouts that could be reused in different parts of the site to keep things consistent and well-organized. The new design uses lots of imagery to showcase the gardens to the fullest and looks great on both desktop and mobile devices.
Due to the size of the site and to make navigation easier, a large burger-style mega-menu was used for the site, supported by lots of on-page links, directions, and buttons that will also guide users to the wide variety of information on the gardens, the College and the programs offered. An alert bar above the main navigation on the site allows HCP to immediately highlight important information such as operating hours and upcoming events. Custom post types for the different workshops were created, as were a series of custom posts specifically for the Pacific Horticulture College to use for their programs. An event calendar clearly categorizes the wide variety of events and workshops and allows users to filter their selections to see what’s coming up that’s of interest to them.
Caorda’s development team built the beautiful new site on a WordPress builder that will be easy for the HCP and College teams to maintain and update going forward, including a variety of pre-built templates to ensure the layouts of the pages are easy to replicate. The integration with their CRM system for membership and registration was kept and created a seamless experience for users while maintaining existing processes for the HCP staff.
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