About the Project

NAMI is a nationwide organization that has a branch in Spokane, WA. They needed a website that was very user-friendly and easy to navigate. They had a small staff who would need to be able to post blogs and update content themselves.

Check out the NAMI Spokane website and see how it turned out! https://namispokane.org

The website re-build project for NAMI Spokane

It was important to make sure the site had a supportive and uplifting feel. It also needed to be very easy to navigate on different devices by different users. The website we designed was clean, with a white background, but Liorah used the bright colors from the NAMI National style guide to design colorful tabs in the headers of each page to help site visitors quickly navigate to topics of interest by jumping down the page.

There are lots of other local NAMI sites in the US. And we were fortunate to work with an experienced contractor, Ashely Fontaine, was the interim Executive Director of NAMI Spokane at the time. She hired Blue Tiger Studio to work on the website re-build. Ashley had worked with NAMI on several contracts over the years so she had an idea of what worked and what didn’t work well for the non-profit’s online presence. Liorah was her main contact at Blue Tiger Studio, and we quickly developed a plan for the page layout, and audience-focused navigation. Ashley had seen how much more successful other NAMI websites had been when they focused on the audience needs first.

We also added video feeds from the National PSA archives to quickly educate and engage site visitors upon landing on the homepage. As well as immediately showing contact information for crisis lines. The home page has a static image with a slider over the top that cycles through the top priority topics for the audience with buttons that link to more information about each topic. Then the page shows a linked Google Calendar that was the preferred way for the staff to update and edit their existing list of classes and workshops so they display in real time online. The calendar is not as pretty as other options for events listings, but they wanted simplicity of use, and the Google iFrame was a quick and affordable option that they were familiar with and wanted to use. We may update this in the future.

We sourced images of Spokane for the website, so that it didn’t look too generic and really showed where this organization is focused. Additionally we found rights-free images of people holding hands and working as a team to reinforce the message that the organization had for its audience.