The new owner of PearlHarbor.org inherited a site that was rich with information but slow and difficult to use. We were grateful for the opportunity to renew the website dedicated to one of America’s most significant historical sites.
Establishing The ObjectivesÂ
- Refresh the design to replace a very dated look.
- Improve the user experience. Specifically, more clearly explain the differences between the tours—a pain point for many purchasers of Pearl Harbor tours. Improving site speed also fell under this objective.
- Allow editors to more efficiently manage the volume of content on the existing site without sacrificing important information about the history of Pearl Harbor and remembering and celebrating the heroes involved in the attack.
- Make the history and blog content more attractive and engaging, so that people will spend more time learning about the stories behind Pearl Harbor.
Key Updates
- Simplified the main navigation. The old site had main headings such as “History” and “Remember,” which could be difficult to decide between.
- Rebuilt the tour comparison page to make selecting a tour easier
- Reduced the number of tour categories to simplify choice
- Created a page for each key monument at Pearl Harbor, to better explain what’s available at each one
- Created a Plan Your Visit page to help people get started
- Completely reorganized the tour pages layout to provide a more common, natural flow of information, and to improve scannability
The Migration Challenge
Managing the volume of content on this website was the largest challenge we faced. Not only did we have to migrate thousands of pages of content, but also we had to create an organizational system that would allow future content to be visible and organized.
Since the original website had a very flat structure without any categories or other easy ways to identify groupings of content, our first step was to establish what groupings and categories should exist on the website. From there, the development team had to identify each type of content during the migration process.
After updating the design, creating an organizational system that was easy to read and manage, and improving the overall layout, this website has become a great resource for Pearl Harbor tours while honoring its history and veterans well. This new website will give the owners the ability to manage and iterate on it in a way that was not possible before.
