The Green Budget Coalition brings together 21 of Canada’s leading environmental groups to produce recommendations for the annual federal budget, with an aim to advance the government’s action on climate change, biodiversity and related policy. Their previous website was dated, challenging to update and difficult to both navigate and read. GBC needed a more professional-looking site that would help with their credibility and present themselves as a long-standing organization representing reputable members. Their target audience is primarily federal government officials, and secondly media.

We started with my developing a fresh, friendly colour palette and adding a contrasting typeface for headings. Colour choices were tested for accessibility (contrast and colourblindness), which informed design choices throughout the site.

The new site needed to provide easy access to their latest recommendations, which are all categorized and also included in a downloadable PDF. I enhanced the experience by adding a recommendations-specific search and a tool for government officials to view content by specific departments. It’s also easy to navigate between recommendations, via a ‘related’ list. The long list of recommendation pages is now broken out by category inside an accordion tool to minimize overwhelm and help readers navigate one category at a time. A larger font size and improved spacing improves readability. Feature recommendations are now differentiated with colourful blocks and relevant icons created by the report’s designer. The global navigation was simplified, moving Past Recommendations into a submenu of Recommendations to reduce clutter and place focus on the freshest content.

I leveraged the WordPress Block editor and included custom blocks powered by Advanced Custom Fields, to make content creation and editing as smooth as possible while greatly reducing the chances of someone inadvertently breaking the layout. The site is also fully translated to French, for which my knowledge of French was useful.