Procare Solutions works with Anchor & Alpine on an ongoing UX website basis. Procare Solutions has been in the business of child care business management software for nearly 30 years and has thousands of clients. They have acquired companies over the years and 2020 was their year to consolidate under one brand and take the next evolution for their company. 

Takeaways

  • Visual information architecture helps align multiple teams. 
  • An organized and methodical approach to combining multiple websites. 

Process

Procare Solutions had a lot of teams, websites, and vendors to coordinate. We were often “cart before the horse” on the project with branding, SEO, and website design coming together at different parts of the projects. We were fortunate to work with Directive Consulting on SEO and we incorporated the branding by Sustenna Group. 

Visual Information Architecture

We’ve always found that once something is presented visually—everyone can understand and align much quicker. On this project, we created many different sitemaps—from the main website to product architecture to the support website. This helped us all understand how large the project was and what needed to happen next. 

Then we overlaid status marks so we all knew what was completed and still needed attention. 

I know you want to see them, but Procare Solutions is in a competitive space and we’re not here to give away secrets to HeyBrightMama. 

Combining Multiple Websites

To combine the five different websites we had to keep the content migration straightforward and organized. 

SEO Redirects

We used an SEO Redirect spreadsheet to figure out where each page should go from the old sites to the new sites—and if there should be an interstitial. Often we wanted to catch people on the way in and let them know that the original site was now part of the Procare family. 

Blog Post Reviews and Migrations

We listed all the pages on all the blogs and then, with the help of the client, chose which ones to migrate as-is, which ones to migrate as drafts for clean-up and future publishing, and which ones could be deleted. Procare Solutions has a lot of evergreen content and we didn’t want to lose all of that hard work (and SEO!). 

The blogs that were already on WordPress were automatically moved and then posts were culled. The blogs that were on other platforms needed to be hand-moved or we wrote connectors to pull the content into the new WordPress site. 

Ongoing Work

We were all in a race to finish to get the site up and launched on a strict deadline. Yes, we met the deadline, and yes, we all still liked each other at the end of the project. Throughout the build, we were very careful to understand that this site will live for years with many people working on it and evolving it as the business shifts into position. We knew where we could cut some smart corners or backfill after launch, but were incredibly disciplined in building a really solid, secure, and flexible website. 

We now have a handful of ongoing projects—sometimes we pitch the client ideas we have to improve the experience, and sometimes they come to us with a pitch or request. Throughout the process, we are happy to work with such a dedicated and smart group of people who are all moving in the same direction.