Westwerk Launches “Content Rocket Ship” for Client
Earlier this year, Westwerk announced its partnership with Twin Cities-based non-profit, Pollen. Pollen is in the business of breaking down barriers to create a space for communities to be better connected, and its website was integral to the organization’s success. It needed to serve as the main touchpoint with its core audiences of donors, content contributors and community of readers. This publishing-centric website needed to bring user-generated content to life, it needed to serve as a place where civic-minded engagers could interact with one-another and have a voice, and it needed to seamlessly encourage content sharing to expand the Pollen network.
Our first strategic deepdive centered around evaluating the existing Opportunities section. We worked with Pollen to identify strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately craft a stronger, longer-term solution. The revamped Opportunities section mirrors the familiar layout, functionality and simplicity of Pinterest, and the quick-and-easy submission form helps encourage membership, further expanding the Pollen network. Users can now submit paid featured posts, creating a new revenue stream for the non-profit. Additionally, we streamlined the user-generated content submission process. Pollenites can now quickly submit content, the small Pollen admin team can review it at their convenience, edit where necessary and publish immediately. The opportunities section now effectively allows users to connect with one-another, upload their own inspiring community content and share it within their networks.
Another core challenge was to create a way to provide engaging long-form editorial content. We developed exclusively for Pollen a completely customized long-form content builder within WordPress. Pollen can now create gorgeously complex, magazine-style layouts, with the flexibility to swap out entire CSS style sheets (typography, color palettes, text size, hover effects, images, etc.), spotlight its beautiful, inspired editorial content (photography, gifs, animations, illustrations, videos and text), and more, in mere clicks of a button. The content is also easily consumable on mobile and tablet devices, with options to swap content presentation on smaller screens. Pollen’s content editing abilities now rival those publications with million dollar web budgets, but on a non-profit budget.
Together, we set out to imagine the internet-impossible, push the WordPress boundaries like it had never been done before and ultimately create a design and development masterpiece. Check out their revamped site for yourself, here.
