Safer Schools Together

Safer Schools Together (SST) is a remarkable group of people who train educators, law enforcement and parents across North America on threat assessment, violence and bullying prevention, and intervention strategies. They help to identify behavioural patterns and address them before they end in conflict or tragedy. It’s remarkable work and identifying and preventing a single act of bullying or another tragic event makes it all worth it.

The Challenge

SST found Caorda through a competitive keyword Google Search (thanks to the digital marketing team for their stellar SEO work) and made contact through our contact form. They were looking for a refresh of their logo, branding and existing website.

Over the years, a plethora of website developers had stacked a huge number of WordPress plugins onto the site, which was dragging the performance down significantly. There were more plugins installed than we had ever seen thus far! The navigation had become overly busy and a bit disjointed. Layers upon layers of new sections had been added to the website without a succinct strategy, making it difficult to understand from a user perspective. This made it extremely difficult for important visitors to locate basic information, thus translated into SEO challenges.

The organization does business in both the USA and Canada, and so policies and procedures differ dramatically. On the old site, there was no coherent segmentation of the US/Canadian content. Needless to say, the castle made of cards was about to come crashing down.

The Solution

Before a single line of code was written, Caorda and SST sat down and developed an entirely new architecture for the website. This involved a completely new WordPress framework and theme, as well as a ground-up rebuild of the site’s framework and navigation strategy. We worked with the SST team to prioritize the content that is most useful to their audience, in order to provide users with a clear path through the pages.

To distinguish the Canadian content from the American content, we developed a country selector, then adjusted the content and events that displayed for each country’s public interface. This has greatly increased the level of engagement, as well as the amount of time visitors spend on the site. Finally, they are seeing content relevant to their needs.

The long-outdated events feature was replaced with a much more robust and fast-loading integration, which has proved a hit with the team due to its ease of use and scalability throughout other parts of the website; it had even allowed them to pivot toward remote events rather than live events (such as those affected by COVID-19). The website design team applied a captivating and modern look and feel throughout the pages, which welcomes visitors equally whether they are viewing the site on a mobile phone or a desktop computer.

With an updated user experience focused on high-quality calls-to-action and a clean and focused navigation structure, SST can deliver its message presentation and training events to the people who need it.