The history of this site is classic. In the mid-1990's someone built a website for the WAA. A year later, the marketing division took control of it and made it prettier. A few years later, someone complained that the site was only getting changed every few weeks or so, so someone was brought in full-time to make decisions for the site and add content. A few years go by and that person is a bottle-neck to content going on line. Thus, they brought in the Content Management System team. The CMS allowed a dozen internal people (plus a few dozen chapter leaders) to add, edit, and remove content from the web site. In this process, the site was redesigned to accommodate the CMS. However, while the CMS behind the site allowed for more content and more production, the design didn't allow for much change. It quickly began to look dated and stilted.
While a planned complete redesign was scheduled for spring 2008, the site needed a new face lift and some minor tweaks to help stem the loss of traffic to a site that never looked like it changed day to day.
We redesigned the homepage from scratch, mostly to allow for more changeable design elements (to make it obvious that this was a site that changes and evolves all the time), and to adjust the navigation to allow new visitors to jump in without having to learn our own organizational patois. We also added an ad system, a game system, and made a few tweaks to the basic template of the pages, all of which were designed to allow us to get our massage out to more visitors faster.