Home page upgrade for Providence Health & Services

View final home page | Side-by-side

Project:

The corporate home page of Providence Health & Services (formerly Providence Health System) is a page controlled by the central office and not by the Marketing department of Oregon (where yours truly works). However, it was in desperate need of an overhaul, or at least a re-skinning. When the opportunity was presented to me to help out (in baby-sized steps), I was more than happy to help out.

Roles fulfilled:

html/css design and development. Staff interface designer for the Oregon Region.

Good for users:

The page has gone from a giant file-size to a more reasonable file-size, great news for dial-up users. Additionally, the final page is much more accessible to alternative users (screen readers, PDA web clients, etcetera). Branding has a friendlier face and navigation is clearer to most groups of the page’s users.

Good for client:

Bandwidth and load on the server has been reduced by more than 68% for fresh page views, and more than 87% for page refreshes. It supports the brand better as an interim solution as the entire domain awaits a complete design, development and architectural overhaul. More semantically-meaningful markup, and unobtrusive JavaScript in the final page mean that no content is hidden from search engines, improving the relevance of search engine results. The better accessibility directly supports Providence’s mission and core values of Compassion for those that have special needs, something Providence had fallen short of doing with its web presence previously.