Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce
Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce is an organization dedicated to improving economic development, opportunities, and education in Albuquerque and throughout the state of New Mexico. The AHCC wants a complete redesign of their website to feel modern, simple, and easy for users to access information on membership to the AHCC, upcoming events, and programs in Albuquerque.
Problem
The client is running into issues with the user interface of the site and by this they explained they have too much content displayed on the homepage, issues with having varying fonts on different pages of the website, and overall needing a new and fresh look to the website. They were very specific in wanting the Convention and Tourism, one of their most frequently visited pages, to be a "main page" and be different from the other content page layouts.
Solution
To address the issue with the user interface, I redesigned the homepage, content page layouts, as well as a homepage for the Convention and Tourism page. They provided example websites and in them I noticed they love the large hero image area with a statement of who the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce is. They wanted the website to feel professional yet have a personal feel to New Mexico.
I wanted to achieve this by using clean, easy-to-read font families with the addition of a script font family to create that personal touch. I ultimately went with Cheap Pine Sans for the headings, Montserrat for the body font, and Thirsty Script for the subheadings. Cheap Pine Sans is a clean sans serif with some characters to the edges to provide a more personal feel and Thirsty Script is a font family the makes the site feel historic, yet new and fun.
Overall, you can see this effect through the use of the script font intermingled with the heading font throughout the site. It allows for visual interest yet familiarity to the site.
Role
Web Designer
Team
Solo Designer (& I also developed the site)
Timeline
4 weeks, May 2024
Tools
Adobe XD
Monday
Google Analytics
WordPress
Skills
User research
Interface design
Usability testing
HTML/CSS
Javascript
Simplify Info
The client also wanted the homepage and Convention and Tourism page very concise and ease of access to the information the public needs. I achieved this by adding boxed blurbs with icons that lead to the corresponding pages of the four most popular items users are looking for. On the homepage I added information about AHCC, a news section, the different programs AHCC provides, upcoming events, and the sponsors section. This information is currently on their homepage yet it can be difficult to find as it is all using various fonts and the headers are not labeled consistently.
Three C's - Consistent Color Choices
The events section currently is quite large so I wanted to make the area display the three most current upcoming events with the ability to favorite events and adding in their theme colors of blue and yellow to pop against the mostly white background.
Throughout the site, they wanted to take the squiggle motif from the logo and incorporate that in minimal amounts throughout the site so to do this, I used it as a divider for one line headings that are not using the script subheading.
Simple and Clean
For the content page layouts, the current site is quite busy with the header or they are omitting them completely which can make it hard for users to know where they are on the website. To address this issue, I created a content page header with a background image of imagery throughout New Mexico, the page title with the squiggle motif and a section for the breadcrumbs to know where one is in the website. Overall for content page layouts, the information should be concise, easy to find and read, and legible for users and this is achieved through adequate amounts of white space as well as sections using a light grey or blue overlay of a background image sections so it is not one long area of white space to scroll through.
Familiar and Consistent
For the Convention and Tourism page, they added elements of the timeline, videos, testimonials, and more buttons to correspond to the appropriate pages. The header remains the same to the content pages yet it has a large hero area like the homepage instead of a content page header. This is requested by the AHCC as on their current site they have a similar layout as their homepage with a hero area and wanted to display beautiful imagery of the events they hold at the convention center in Albuquerque.
New Design
Click on image to view Convention & Tourism layout
