Digital Women Leaders
Online coaching resource for women in journalism and media.
Intended for students, professionals, and C-level media executives, Digital Women Leaders (DWL) helps women find mentors and grow their careers and is a widely used tool for female journalists navigating their professional journeys. Founder Katie Hawkins-Gaar turned to Big Sea to build a more user-friendly, scalable, and reliable platform. As an added bonus, Big Sea put together an all-woman team to manage, design, and develop the website built for women, by women.
The Problem
A powerful organization in need of a stronger digital identity
- Develop a recognizable brand and style
- Build a user-friendly, searchable database of coaches
- Create an inviting user experience on a new mission-driven website
The Challenge
A robust program held back by limited website functionality
For a program with 120+ mentors across 100+ specialties and topic areas, Digital Women Leaders had very limited functionality on its website. The mission-driven website simply listed available mentors and their specializations, with no way for users to search for mentors or filter by specialization based on their needs. Search functionality had to be intuitive but also easy to update with new mentors, skill sets, and services.
The website also wasn’t built to grow along with the organization, and so it needed to be more scalable to prepare for the organization’s future.
In addition, the website had been built before the brand was created, so no logo or other memorable branding elements existed to use in designing and promoting the website.
The Solution
Creating an intuitive, searchable directory
To build something truly scalable, we decided to create an app that collects and maps mentor data from a web-based spreadsheet, managed by Digital Women Leaders. This way, Digital Women Leaders could add mentors by simply including their information on the master spreadsheet, without creating new individual pages or requiring a developer. Through the app, we implemented filter-based search functionality, enabling users to find and compare mentors based on their coaching requirements.
Big Sea also built an entirely new website for Digital Women Leaders, linking the app to populate mentor information and help users find professional guidance suited to their needs. Both the Digital Women Leaders team and their users applauded the website redesign, citing its user-friendly search functionality and comprehensive career, specialty, and topic filters.
“I felt like everyone at Big Sea was very attentive and responsive, and I also felt like all of my needs were met. I am thrilled with how the site looks and how it’s working, but maybe even more importantly, I have received such good feedback from people who have emailed in, are shouting it out on Twitter and social media.”
Katie Hawkins-GaarFounder, Digital Women Leaders
