Blog

SPEAK! is proud to announce the launch of another website - this time for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis! If you keep up with us, you know that we love working with non-profit organizations in Memphis, and this was certainly no exception!

The BGCM website was developed as part of a larger marketing campaign that will begin to roll out early 2010, and we could not be happier with the end result of the website design. It can be challenging for a non-profit to encourage involvement from the community without playing "tearjerker" statistics or stories, but SPEAK! and BGCM set out to create a website that set aside the negative emotions. 

The new website creates an uplifting presence for the organization, focusing on the positive effects that BGCM has on the lives of the children involved in its programs. It was also a goal for the website to feel extremely kid-friendly without alienating a largely adult website audience. As you can see, the bright colors and hand-drawn illustrations provide just such an environment while still communicating a strong call to action for involvement.

The BGCM website uses SiteWrench as its content management system, so in addition to being able to make on-the-fly content changes, BGCM can create database-backed registration forms, dynamic event calendars and much more. The new site will serve as a great centerpiece for the upcoming marketing campaign and provide a platform for BGCM to continue to tell stories of life-change.

Last week, Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, AL, took its newly designed website live. The new site is a place for the many different audiences of Beeson to come to get the information they are looking for quickly. As a visitor navigates through the website, it becomes clear very quickly that this is not simply an online brochure. The site has several hundred pages of information that have been developed with the Beeson audiences in mind. With so much information, it became very important that SPEAK! and Beeson develop an intuitive, dynamic navigational structure. 

As a result, the main navigation and utility links on the home page provide incredibly quick access to all of the major entry points for the different website audiences. This is accomplished while maintaining a clean, elegant home page design that gives way to a robust, flexible design as the visitor moves from one sub page to the next.

Beeson's new website was built into SiteWrench, giving the school control over all of its content while also providing dynamic tools like the calendar widget (located on all sub pages beneath the sub navigation), chapel service archives, photo galleries and more. Overall, the new Beeson website has been a huge step forward in design and functionality for the school, and we're excited to see the new website live!