The importance of historic preservation cannot be overstated, and we’re fortunate that it is abundant in the Washington, DC area and especially in Old Town Alexandria, where New Target’s headquarters is located. As interest in historic preservation grew throughout the 1960s and 70s, organizations and universities began offering day or week-long cultural heritage courses. Seeing that there was a need for more classes and consistency, the National Preservation Institute (NPI) was created in 1980 as a nonprofit focused on historical preservation. NPI’s seminars focus on topics of current concern to professionals involved in the management and stewardship of cultural resources such as Planning and Evaluation, Laws and Regulations, Native American Cultural Resources, and more. The time had come for NPI to reimagine their website and for this they turned to the New Target team.
NPI had a clear idea of what they wanted and understood the changes that needed to be made to get there. The first task was to upgrade their website from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 which makes the website, first and foremost, mobile and tablet friendly. During the Drupal migration and upgrade, we modernized the website’s design to be more contemporary and included fonts with better readability. Since the organization offers professional training, helping users easily find courses and locations is paramount. Together with NPI, we reduced the amount of duplicate and unnecessary copy in order to help users parse relevant information quicker and create an optimal user experience.
Next, a simple but important change was moving the Register link from being submerged within seminars and contact to a more prominent location within the new sticky header. We added a calendar page with new filtered search for month, seminar category, and location which serves as a convenient way for users to find seminars quickly. In keeping NPI’s publishing and content creation users top of mind as well, individual seminars are now set up in a way that they only need to be entered once and will display in various locations throughout the website, saving time and keeping content consistent throughout.
As an organization that is intent on preserving the past, NPI and New Target carefully disassembled their old website, kept what is valuable, and thoughtfully made room for a new, modern website experience. We know that it is important to preserve our past, and New Target is thrilled to be a small part of NPI’s efforts within historic preservation.
New Target works with associations, nonprofit organizations, and corporations that help people learn new about historic preservation, access healthcare, earn scholarships, plan for retirement, visit new places, and much more. We’d like to work with you, too! Contact us to talk about your website design, website development, and digital marketing projects.