Web Design Internship: Providence Animal Rescue League

As a 5-month internship, I redesigned the website of Providence Animal Rescue League (PARL) in Providence, RI. I began the design process with independent research about the nonprofit’s existing website design, and developed a list of questions to ask the stakeholders at the initial client meeting. These meetings allowed me to identify the client’s goals, motivations, and the message they wanted to communicate.

Shortly after our initial meeting, I travelled with the rest of the intern team to a site visit of the animal rescue league to see how they work and their organization’s community. This site visit was incredibly insightful of what kind of animals were supported and inspired how I wanted to organize my designs.

I then got to work wireframing and sketching the website redesign. After initial design concepts got approved, I worked directly with HubSpot CMS to incorporate the design goals. One major goal of the redesign was to create a more eye-catching homepage that was unique, fresh, and incorporated more of PARL’s brand identity color palette. Another major goal of the redesign was to improve the user experience of the site, specifically with findability and discoverability, after reported complaints from new and existing users not being able to find what they were searching for.

To create a more eye-catching homepage, I collaborated with another design intern who specialized in digital art to create a static image at the top of the homepage as a welcome to PARL’s site. I then incorporated the brand identity color palette in an image grid module that not only promoted discoverability, but also allowed users to view some of PARL’s unique animals.

Another major component I noticed PARL struggled with was the organization of their header tab navigation. I proposed a more intuitive organization of their header dropdowns to promote the findability of their subpages.

PARL published my website redesign on their live site with the updated homepage designs and header navigation organization, so feel free to check it out at the button below!

To ensure the design was user-friendly on a mobile layout, I customized the image grid in HubSpot to appear differently on mobile devices than on desktop to account for a thinner screen size.