Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy – Website Development
Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy
(EBC) is Ontario’s largest and Canada’s second largest land conservation agency, dedicated to preserving natural systems that are home to 58 of Ontario’s native species at risk or of concern.
EBC was looking to upgrade an outdated website to one that was aligned with the current priorities of the organization and reflected its tremendous growth, currently averaging a new reserve every month!
They wanted the site on a platform that could be very easily updated by their staff or volunteers to promote events in which EBC participates, fundraising for sites in development, and new reserves as they come online.
It was also essential that the new site be recognized as secure (https), both for SEO and in order for EBC to qualify for a Google grant of $US$10,000 per month in Search Campaign funding.
Implementation
We selected Northern Village‘s Village CMS platform and worked with them and EBC to design and structure the new website based on optimizing discovery pathways for each target audience, then importing and organizing all existing EBC content within the new site architecture.
We focused on highlighting the many reasons for protecting land, the various mechanisms to do so and the beneficial outcomes, including tax breaks. In addition to facilitating the process of land deeding or establishing conservation agreements, EBC’s new website also promotes volunteering, reserve visits and trail use, with a highlight on a current mission in progress.
EBC’s reserve listings on the site were expanded to provide each its own landing page and present the specific species it helps protect, an image-rich display of the variety of reserves that EBC has created over the past 22 years with maplinks to publicly accessible reserves. We also updated their logo and designed a favicon to provide EBC an updated, uniform, brand image on their new website.
