BTS Arts Learning
For a mission-driven org, making the content findable is the mission.
The Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program (BTSALP) puts arts specialists and arts-integrated curriculum into elementary schools. Its site held everything teachers needed, buried under sprawling, over-nested navigation. My job was to restructure the information architecture and design a homepage that led with the story instead of the sitemap.
Everything was there. Nothing was findable.
Years of growth had left the site deep and tangled, lesson plans, training, events, and advocacy scattered across redundant branches. A teacher looking for a lesson plan had to already know where it lived. The content wasn’t the problem. The structure around it was.
Map the whole thing before touching it.
I started by auditing the existing site into a full information-architecture tree. Drawn out, the over-nesting was impossible to miss, redundant Resources and About branches, deep chains where a teacher had to click and click to reach a single lesson plan.
Four doors, not forty.
The sprawl collapsed into a lean top-level scheme, four clear entry points that matched how people actually arrive, with the deep content organized underneath rather than competing at the top.
Lead with the story, then the shortcuts.
The homepage wireframe opens on a promo video, the mission in motion, then stacks the story and the shortcuts in the order people actually need them. Each band below earns its place.
Promo-video hero
The program’s impact, shown not told, above the fold.
Quick-access tiles
Lesson Plans, Training Videos, Event Calendar, News, the four most-wanted destinations, lifted out of the nav.
Featured posts + signup
A flexible module keeps the story fresh, and a newsletter signup turns a visit into a relationship.
The redesigned homepage wireframe, the three bands above, laid out as handed off for development.
Good information architecture is invisible generosity.
The engagement handed off annotated wireframes ready for development, a restructured site and a homepage that put the mission first. Nobody notices IA when it’s right. They just find what they came for. For a nonprofit running on attention and goodwill, that quiet findability is the whole game.
Deliverable was wireframes and IA for development handoff. Outcomes aren’t mine to measure, so I don’t attach numbers to them.