France AVC IdF

The project

France AVC IdF is a French charity dedicated to preventing strokes, helping detect the signs and providing guidance to people who have suffered a stroke or their families. There was a website for the national charity, France AVC, but the Parisian branch, France AVC IdF, did not have an online presence, which prevented it from being known and reached by people potentially in need.

The project is live at https://franceavc-idf.fr/

My contribution to the project

• We defined the identity of the charity based on a few colors and a logo

• We designed the website

• We added all the content of the website based on documents brought by the charity to help them because they were not very familiar with the web

• We created step by step PDFs to help them use the CMS (WordPress) to update the website

Challenges

France AVC IdF was my first freelance project as a designer. We started the project from scratch. The only piece of brand they had was their logo that they didn't want to change, and a few colors.

Help them understand what they need and structure their information

Leaders of the charity wanted to have a website to upload news about the charity, and help members be aware of the next events. We saw this website as an opportunity to increase awareness and reach new people. It paid off, because 2 years later, we are on the first result page for "France AVC" above most of the regional branches, reaching new potential members.

We decided to use the homepage as a way to:

• Showcase the news of the charity

• Quickly know how to detect a stroke, if a user looking for symptoms scroll the website

• Leverage actions (donation, membership, volunteering)

They had tens of documents they wanted to add on the website. We spent quite some time working on the website structure, categorizing and defining navigation levels and sublevels to be sure that everything was in the right spot.

Offer a flexible, yet easy to use CMS

The biggest challenge was to be sure that they could use WordPress to modify the content and give some love to the website from time to time. They're not digital native and didn't know WordPress back then.

The home is made of custom modules, but we added custom fields to WordPress, so they could modify everything. We made an extensive PDF explaining step by step what they had to do to modify each block. We also did a few workshops with them.

The articles are using standard WordPress modules that we stylized, so it was as easy as possible for them. We also provided a step-by-step PDF, with details about how to add an article of a category on the nav.

What I learned

France AVC IdF humbly reminded me that while I was almost born with a phone in my hands, a lot of people still don't feel confident using technology. Nothing is obvious, and we have to consider everybody while designing.