Project Spotlight: Friends of the Smokies

We had the opportunity to work with Friends of the Smokies (FOTS) on a recent project, collaborating with their marketing team to reimagine their entire website design and functionality. We sat down with Pyxl designer, Taylor Dudney, to hear more about the project, the process and the outcome of this awesome site.

Give us a little background about the project.

Taylor: Friends of the Smokies came to Pyxl looking to address a couple of issues with a new site, both functionally and visually. The nature of the site requires FOTS to house a lot of information – they were looking for a better way to organize all of it and make it quickly accessible and highly intuitive for each of the individual user types. They also wanted a cleaned-up approach to navigation – something efficient, simplistic and easy to use.

How did the project team approach the redesign?

Taylor: Well, we really started from scratch. After a few working sessions with the client, we identified three major user groups:

1. Lovers of the outdoors (broken out by age)
2. Those who want to give back to the park
3. Information gatherers about the park – planning a vacation, etc.

Once we defined the user types, we broke down each group’s individual goals in using the site. This exercise enables us to map out and organize custom routes (conversion paths) to the information each user type is looking for.

We then went through our I/A (Information Architecture) process. We took an inventory of all the content on the site and organized it according to users and paths, working with the client and our communications team to determine what content was necessary, what needed work and what needed to be retired. This process involves a lot of collaboration – our whole project team weighed in and helped make these decisions.

What was different about the Friends of the Smokies project?

Taylor: Three things really stuck out to me in the process of this project.

The information:

The sheer amount of information required for this site made it a really unique undertaking and required another layer of strategy on the front end. It was challenging, but ultimately a great experience.

The photography:

Working with such rich, beautiful photography was amazing. We don’t always have the luxury of working with such dynamic custom photos like we did on this project – it made a huge difference and really made the site.

The care:

Working with Friends of the Smokies was great – their genuine care for the park’s wellbeing was incredible. Hearing them talk about the park and their deep love for the Smokies was contagious and it carried over to the Pyxl team and all aspects of the project.

You can view the final product here: http://friendsofthesmokies.org/

One of our passions at Pyxl is collaborating with clients to create web properties that help solve problems, hit goals and meet audiences. If you would like to hear more about us or our website process, drop us a line – we would love to talk with you.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022