Polar Bears International 2010

About This Project

Polar Bears International has grown leaps and bounds in the years that Notion Design has been their development team. In total we have completed 3 design revisions. The 2010 version of polarbearsinternational.org was the largest revamp of the polar bear conservation organization's website yet.

Notion Design worked with PBI staff to develop a design and content structure that would provide the organization's ample amount of content in new and interesting ways.

There were several challenges facing the team:

- A complete information architecture rewrite.
- A new design with a wider, more inviting, and more flexible layout.
- Integration of a donation management system throughout the website.
- Use of a content management system that supports all required features, many custom.
- A plan for a future gift shop redesign.
- Creation of a new newsletter layout and system to support it (subscribe, unsubscribe, etc.)
- Appropriate redirects as required to support PBI's existing high search ranking.
- A content rewrite.

We spent a long time on the design direction, throwing out several designs that didn't quite accomplish the goals we set down. Eventually we all settled on the present design, after many rounds of back-and-forth with the PBI team. Included in the redesign was a new layout for the giftshop, which will employ many tried-and-true e-commerce strategies to make the user experience really work well.

PBI's team rewrote every last bit of content from the old site, paying special attention to the narrative of the new content. Their intent was to make the text of the website far more entertaining and informative to read.