Nonprofit Website Redesign

Nulu Business Association

For this project, I was given the nonprofit NuLu Business Association (NBA) based in Louisville, KY and was told to revamp their website. The purpose of the NBA is to support small businesses and residents of the East Market District in Louisville, KY. NuLu is made up of variety of small businesses, everything from architects, quirky antique shops, art galleries, macaroon bars, and more. Small businesses of the NuLu district can sign up to be a member of the NBA and be included in on different festivals NuLu hosts to marketing opportunities and more.

Before even touching design, I did a lot of digging around the NBA's website for more information about the nonprofit--what their goals are and what their intended audience is. I also wanted to figure out what the number one purpose of the website was. Through research, I realized that there are two main parties involved in the NBA--NuLu businesses and local residents/tourists. I needed to not only simplify and create a clean, user-friendly space for the NBA and the small businesses of NuLu to interact with each other, I also needed to create an engaging, upbeat, and informational website for residents/tourists. It's a case of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine." I needed to be able to create an environment that would make the small businesses of Nulu want to join. Basically, I channeled the attitude of FOMO and applied this concept to both of my target audiences. I needed to create a website that would make residents/tourists want to go to NuLu. Because why would small businesses want their information out on a website that their potential customers can barely use? Or a website that makes it difficult to find any information about NuLu businesses or even answer the question, "What is NuLu?" Small businesses are paying for NBA memberships, so I wanted to make the site worthwhile for both parties.

For the color palette, I kept NuLu's brand colors because I liked how quirky they were. The orange and blue were super fun to bring in. I thought these colors also added to the friendliness of the overall brand and website. As far as my site map goes, I pretty much kept the original structure but cleaned and condensed pages down if I felt they weren't really needed or if they worked better under a different dropdown label.

I'm pretty proud of the project because not only was it my first time really designing a website, it was also my first time using Adobe XD. It was SO exciting learning how to wireframe, prototyping, and practicing different web strategies I've learned over the past several months. I'm mostly exciting about learning how to prototype my website and being able to build out different features and actually being able to animate these features.

Now that this project has been through the submitted project critique, I'll probably go back through and clean concepts up/add in different elements.You can check out nulu.org to walkthrough the current Nulu Business Association website.

The above mockup shows a few sample pages of my design. The homepage (on the large Mac) splash would be a video that would cycle through showing all the different shops and people of Nulu.

The three images above in the first row give a static walkthrough of my version of the business directory,
from the actual directory page to the business profile. The two images on the bottom row show what the current NuLu site uses for the directory. As you can see, it's very bland and not at all engaging. It doesn't really give you any information about NuLu businesses and it's just hard to find the what kind of businesses NuLu has to offer. This was a major problem on the current Nulu website and it is a problem I spent a lot of time trying to address.

The membership information and membership packages selection page was a nother major problem area for the website. The orignal version does not give a lot of information about the Association or about the benefits and membership packages. I want to give a little bit more information and establish more user trust in the package selction process. I want people to know what they are getting into and not feel unsafe about joining the NBA. The first two images above show the original Why Join page and the last picture is my design.