Talmadge, San Diego
Brand identity and custom Wordpress website for the San Diego neighborhood of Talmadge.
Talmadge, a neighborhood in the city of San Diego, came to us with an out-of-date website that featured extensive community resources and highlighted their many organizations and projects. They needed help organizing their website and content into an intuitive flow that would make it easy for residents to navigate and ultimately encourage community engagement.
We started by designing a visual style for the neighborhood. We reasearched the history of the neighborhood as well as visual elements that were currently in use by various committees and programs.
The historic gates that mark the entry points to the neighborhood are iconic and were already being used in artwork by a few organizations and businesses in the area. We decided to expand off of the existing visual style and create a set of illustrations that captured the historic gates, light posts, stone pillars, and prototypical structures (including houses, apartments, and businesses) to create a visual style for the neighborhood.
We asked the community to submit photos to use in the design of the site. We were overwhelmed with the response and excitement from the community before we even launched the site. We had enough images to not only use in the design of the site, but also to feature in a special gallery of resident-submitted photos.
We also created a logo for the neighborhood that features the lamp that sits atop each of the historic gates and illuminates the entrances to the community.
After our visual style was in place, we designed the website to include all of the community's organizations and volunteer-based committees.
The new Talmadge website features a calendar of events, historical resources, a blog that neighbors can contribute to, and tons of resources — all in an easy-to-navigate, intuitive design that will enable community members to easily get involved and participate in all the projects and events going on around the neighborhood.
We created this custom theme built on Wordpress so Talmadge volunteers can easily update their pages.
We did a content review of the existing site and determined there was an enormous amount of content that was duplicated throughout the site. This made it impossible for the volunteer admins to keep it updated, and wasn't easy for the user to navigate.
Knowing certain content elements needed to be represented on multiple sections of the site, we created a modular content system. Each organization, project or committee, calendar event, and news article is represented by a module with just a brief snapshot of the content. These modules link back to a single content source for streamlined editing and sharing, but can be displayed throughout the site on various pages to guide users to the information they need.
The new Talmadge.org is not only a resource for the community, but a tool for local businesses and realtors. We created revenue-generating advertising and sponsorship capabilities to keep the website self-sustaining and to support the not-for-profit organizations within Talmadge. We've already seen a drastic jump in traffic to the website since our soft launch. We hope the new Talmadge.org will continue to serve as a tool to connect the community, encourage volunteering, and reflect the wonderful neighborhood Talmadge is.
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