TEMPO Site Overhaul

Take It From the Top

Truckee Excellence in Music Parents Organization (TEMPO) is a non-profit group with an amazing mission: to help local students participate in honor bands, festivals, workshops and band tours free from the financial burden often placed on families, to ensure that music education is accessible to all students in the area.

TEMPO is run by an all-volunteer group of local music aficionados and parents of children currently participating in school music programs in town; their devotion to the kids and the cause is inspiring, and they operate a packed and fruitful roster of annual events.

Impressive, right? TEMPO had just one problem: the website they were relying on to communicate their message and advance their mission was confusing, off-putting and only partially-functional. This is where we came in.

Build From a Blueprint

The primary issue with the existing TEMPO website was that it had been thrown together over the years, one piece at a time, by a succession of band kid parents who were maintaining the site only because no one else had raised their hand. Issues included:

• A chaotic menagerie of mismatched fonts
• A somewhat random collection of colors that didn’t serve a unified purpose
• Decade-old photos of kids (and teachers) who’d graduated from the schools years ago
• Functional limitations imposed by the site platform (Weebly)
• No coherent organizing design philosophy

Most importantly, due to the way content had serially accumulated over time, the site had no central organizing principle. Information that was vital to kids and families entering school band programs was hard to find and haphazardly arranged, and TEMPO’s core message (and fundraising efforts) weren’t foregrounded.

Elevation Works started the rebuild with an “information architecture-first” approach, optimizing every step of the process—from initial napkin sketches through design iterations to final build—to serve a focused final goal: creation of a logically-organized, easy-to-navigate website.

Harmonic Convergence

In a professional website design and development project, strategy and avenues of collaboration need to be established even before the first pencil layout sketch hits paper.

Elevation Works worked with TEMPO to lay the groundwork for an efficient and effective comprehensive build process:

• In a series of conversations and email exchanges with the client, we made sure everyone involved was 100% clear on exactly what TEMPO is today and how that translated to what the website needed to accomplish
• Elevation Works organized the build process and architected the site plan to accomplish one goal: execute the strategic vision that all the stakeholders had expressed, honed and finalized
• Clear, proactive and timely communication is crucial to the success of any web development project: Elevation Works made sure that TEMPO was always fully aware of current project status, and made a point of answering likely questions before they needed to be asked

The Remix

Once everyone involved had agreed on project priorities and strategy and build milestones and timeline were clearly established, Elevation Works designed and assembled a modern website that suited TEMPO’s current needs:

• Outdated legacy information and older site elements that had outlived their usefulness were jettisioned, and remaining site content was presented with new material in a hierarchy designed to make it easy for students and families to access the information they need
• All of the most crucial site information and functionality is now conveyed via inviting and engaging modern design, communicating TEMPO’s mission much more effectively than the site’s slapdash previous iteration
• Crucially, truckeebands.org now functions correctly and is fully accessible on a wide range of devices, not just desktop computers (over 50% of site visits today come from mobile devices)

Coda

TEMPO’s new website is a significant upgrade in terms of appealing design and clear, actionable presentation of information, and the organization is very happy with the improvements. More importantly, though, local music program students and their families now have a well-organized, accessible resource for the information and materials they need for musical and academic success. And TEMPO can take advantage of a functioning online HQ to boost fundraising and advance their community mission.