Empowerment Council Website Re-Design

The Empowerment Council is a non-profit organization that helps users of addiction and mental health services advocate for systemic change. I worked with a small team to create a new website for them that would explain their mission clearly and house the many resources that they offered.

Our challenge was to refresh the look and improve the overall usability, and to make the mission of the organization as clear as possible. The site also needed to be easy to update by the Empowerment Council staff.

I began by creating two possible looks for the website, both based on their values of equity, respect, justice, collaboration, independence, integrity and accountability; and based and based on information gathered through stakeholder interviews.

Based on client feedback I further explored the look that they chose, choosing fonts and images, and refining the colour palette.

Once the colours and fonts were chosen I designed the home page. It had to achieve the specific goals of quickly and concisely explaining what the organization is about, what their mission is and what systemic advocacy is. This was achieved through a clear tagline, short paragraphs of text and appropriate icons.

The other major challenge of the site was finding a way to house the many important resources that the Empowerment Council provided for its users. Using WordPress, we modified an existing theme by adding a sidebar and search function, creating a system that made the client's documents easy to browse, search within and update.

View the full site at www.empowermentcouncil.ca.