The Animal Medical Center Website Redesign

About the Project

The Animal Medical Center in New York City is a non-profit veterinary center that is a national leader in animal care. As an academic veterinary hospital, The AMC promotes the health and well-being of companion animals through advanced treatment, research, and education. The AMC had the excellent staff and facilities to fulfill its mission, but its website was sorely lacking. The AMC staff had no ability to update the site and with inconsistent navigation, users were not able to find the information that was available.

The AMC contracted with Balance Interactive for a complete website redesign. The project involved a customized web strategy, a content analysis and strategy, new site architecture, innovative design, and development using the Drupal open-source content management system.

The Balance Interactive solution included:

Customized Web Strategy

A custom web strategy was developed for the website to target key goals:

• Make the website more engaging and appealing to key audiences.
• Gain greater control over content, both in terms of site presentation and back-end management.
• Offer visitors the proper perception of The AMC, defining what the organization is and what it does.

Key recommendations were to:

• Organize content in ways that help users travel through your site.
• Use the website to start and reinforce relationships with key audiences.
• Implement a content management system that allows staff to keep the website fresh and current.

Content Management with Drupal

The website was developed with Drupal to streamline site maintenance. The AMC staff can now update content easily with a WSYWIG editor and other administrative tools. Page components can be added and removed with the click of a mouse. Content pieces are dynamically added to several areas of the site when they are created. The site is completely scalable to seamlessly incorporate additional content.

Audience- and Service-Based Site Architecture

The AMC website serves its clients, referring veterinarians, professional staff, and veterinary students. Content for all of these audiences was interspersed throughout the site. It was hard to find and confusing when the wrong audience stumbled across the content.

The Balance Interactive content and usability team worked to define a site architecture that makes the content easily accessible to key audiences. Content was also logically grouped by the services that The Animal Medical Center provides. The result is a website that is easy to navigate for all key audiences, with increased page traffic on all key pages.

SEO and Keyword Work

Once the site was deployed, Balance performed monthly analyses on the Google analytics data. Balance also did keyword research on several specialty areas. With this data in hand, the AMC website was optimized for greater exposure in search engines. The site set up, including the use of content tagging and taxonomies, allows for this work to be done easily and with measureable results.

Evaluation & Results

Since launch of www.amcny.org:

• Visits to the AMC site increased .16%
• Page views on the AMC site increased 22%
• Online email list subscriptions grew by 3%
• Online appointment sheet downloads increased by 69%
• New visitors increased by 11.71%
• Traffic to the AMC blog has grown by 61%
• Traffic to AMC social media has increased by 79%
• Referral traffic to the AMC site has increased from the following sources:
  • Blog – 52% rise
  • Facebook – 58.6% rise
• Page views of content that explains key service offerings increased more than 9% per page on the website