Parents’ Place of Maryland (PPMD)

The Parents’ Place of Maryland (PPMD) began in 1990 as a grass-roots effort of families, professionals, and community leaders determined to provide resources, support, and information to parents of children with disabilities and special health care needs. Today, the Parents’ Place offers a variety of programs and services that continue to support families of children with disabilities and special health care needs.

Challenges

PPMD staff identified that their existing website was missing features and functionality.

They also felt it was both difficult for their clients to find the needed information and it was difficult for staff to update.

Among the improvements they desired on their new site were:

Improved Accessibility
Improve ease of use on the donations page
Provide a focus on funders
Showcase important resources to the users with minimal clicks.
Integration with Salesforce

Solution

They hired AmDee to rethink the navigation and restructure where necessary. We built a WordPress driven website with simplified navigation, clean lines and easy points of access for the most important information.

Additionally we ensured that the new website meets WCAG 2.0 AA requirements.

We began by identifying the existing user flow using feedback from case studies and analytical data and then designing a more intuitive flow based on our results.

Major changes that were completed by AmDee included:

On the home page, featuring the 3 most sought-after pages from either resources, services or programs and highlighting them via 1-click by PPMD staff.
On the search page, segmenting the results by categories, based on relevance to the search query.
On the donate page, we created 5 tabs to exhibit the 5 most common ways a user may donate or contribute to PPMD
Created a landing page to showcase the logos of funders as well as provide a way for the user to click and go directly to their website
Reduced clicks on the resource page. By utilizing categories, users are able to access all of the resources assigned to each within a single click or two if there are more than 4 resources per category.
Forms were built with Gravity Forms for easier updates done by the PPMD staff. Using logic they tie into Salesforce to keep PPMD staff up-to-date for communications with their constituents and to gather feedback after interactions.

Parents’ Place of Maryland (PPMD)

From the Client

Val Englert Former Communications Coordinator PPMD

Challenges

Solution

Within one month after launch...