Greater Androscoggin Humane Society

GAHS strengthens the central Maine community by supporting the humane care of animals. Their dedication to the humane treatment of all animals results in a happier, healthier community for humans and their animal companions alike.

Roles

• Information Architecture
• UX & Prototyping
• Website Design
• Custom WordPress Website Development

Challenge

The Greater Androscoggin Humane Society had long outgrown the Drupal 6-based site it launched in 2009. The content management experience was cumbersome and the site offered few ways to present content in a compelling way. Relying on PetTango’s embedded toolset provided a difficult experience for visitors looking to bring a new pet into their home.

For 2019, the challenge was clear: make the site work better for administrators and site visitors alike. The presentation should work across all devices and feel like an extension of the beautiful space they call home. Most importantly, the adoption experience should be as simple and straightforward as possible.

PetTango’s basic integration allows sites to list their adoptable pets, but directs users back to PetTango for everything else–photos, videos, descriptions and the application process all happen away from their home site. Not only did this deprive GAHS of an audience for its additional resources and services, it also cut down on the traffic GAHS might enjoy from social shares of their very sharable family of animals for adoption.

We developed a solution that talks directly to PetTango so that site visitors stay on gahumane.org from initial exploration through adoption application, allowing users to have a fully GAHS-branded experience that they can explore and share from, growing the potential audience for use and support of the organization’s many services and resources.

Our initial work focused on creating a more intuitive navigation system to naturally guide visitors to their areas of primary interest. We employed methods similar to an e-commerce site in exposing visitors to pets they may be interested in adopting and leveraged WordPress’ Gutenberg block editor to create custom content blocks that administrators could easily use across any page of the site.

The redesigned site needed to feel warm, friendly, and modern. The team at Springtide Studio exceeded expectations, delivering concepts that expanded on GAHS’s existing branding to include a wider, more engaging color palette and the addition of clean, legible typography.

Combined with photography by Tom McPherson, it all adds up to a site that visitors are exploring more than ever–finding pets they’ll wan to bring home, discovering the wide array of resources GAHS offers, and increasing opportunities for visitors to support the organization.