Neighborhood House Website

The Objective

Neighborhood House came to VIA seeking to redesign its current website, which had become outdated, non-functional, and did not effectively represent the community and organization's activities.

The needs for the website:

• Visual: Ensure the website represents the Neighborhood House brand, showcasing its vibrancy, inclusivity, and community impact.
• Content Strategy: Improve the storytelling. Introduce who Neighborhood House is, help people realize the breadth of their services, and easily find what they are interested in - donating, volunteering, age-specific services, etc.
• Functional: Enhance functionality to include integrated content management, event management, donation processing, and improved communication tools.

Before & After - Website:

The People They Serve

Our content strategy phase gave us key insights into what the current site was and was not doing well. Neighborhood House is a home-away-from-home for families in West Louisville. It’s inviting, vibrant, and full of energy. Their previous website was not.

Users struggled to find the services they were looking for, and the content being presented was not engaging. We addressed these needs from the top down by reorganizing the site's navigation, flows, and services into “Age Groups." With this new organization, the user could quite literally find themselves within the “Community." This provided representation and connection, successfully reflecting the range of services offered.

Site Identity

High-quality photography of people was crucial to bringing emotion into the storytelling and connecting the user and the community being served. With programming for every age, Neighborhood House supports members “from the twinkle to the wrinkle.” The lack of faces on their previous site didn’t make this obvious; we addressed that. Users could now immediately get a sense of who is served and their positive impact on the community.

Flexible Platform To Build Upon

Much of this project was centered around brand expression and content reorganization, but we had to build the site just as thoughtfully. We constructed a component-based design system, which enabled us to both work quickly and deliver a content management system with the flexibility of a page builder and our custom brand identity fully baked in. The Neighborhood House team was able to get up and running quickly, building out pages with their story and people front and center.

The Results

The new nhky.org successfully reflects who Neighborhood House is and where they want to go. We provided them with a flexible architecture and design language that can serve them now and scale as they grow.

For more than 125 years, Neighborhood House has been a home for many: a community hub and a safe and supportive environment for infants, kids, families, and seniors to connect with one another. Now, they have a digital presence that reflects their warmth and passion while representing the most important part of who they are—the community they serve.

"We had a great experience with the VIA team. We had been struggling for several years with a dated website that was hard to manage and did not reflect the vitality of our brand. The VIA team was able to quickly get to know us and understand what we needed our website to both say about and do for us. They also helped us manage the work in order to stay in budget. We're thrilled with the result: a website that really communicates who we are and what we do."

— Jennie Jean Davidson, Executive Director