Hear from Robin Sidel & Evonne Young on how the Kaiser Family Foundation migrated from a legacy platform to WordPress. Learn from their challenges, new opportunities and best practices as they successfully went from old to new without leaving anyone behind.

1. REDESIGNING KFF.ORG
Battle Entropy

2. Where We Started
And here’s where we landed: www.kff.org
What was happening in 2003?
• Facebook was a college
network.
• MySpace & Friendster were
cool.
• No Twitter.
• No YouTube.
• Palm Pilots and
Blackberries; no
smartphones.
• Flash was big.

3. Redesign Goals
• Create a more cohesive web presence by consolidating
websites.
• Create an intuitive site architecture to reflect how users
search and user information.
• Improve search.
• Make content more accessible on a variety of devices.
• Streamline CMSs and improve efficiency and ease of posting
content.

4. The Kaiser Family of Sites

5. The Process: In the Beginning
• Engaged staff from the beginning and throughout the
process.
• Defined goals.
• Got buy-in from senior management and our board and
stayed in touch with them throughout the process.
• Developed comprehensive RFP, selecting firms that specialize
in a variety of CMSs.

6. Why WordPress?
Matt Mullenweg:
Here, check out how
your home page
would look in
WordPress.
Drew Altman:
We’re starting to
redesign our website.
20 minutes later…

7. Why We Really Chose WordPress
• Kff.org is a deep, complex site. Why not Drupal?
– Alley Interactive first pitched Drupal.
– Concerns about ease-of-use and costly and labor-intensive upgrading.
• WordPress’ intuitive backend.
• Beginning to see other enterprise-wide sites developed on
WordPress.
• Ability to use plugins: Slideshare and Verite.
• Open source environment would allow us freedom to develop
new features quickly and at low-cost.

8. • Evaluate content types
– We ended up with 30+ custom content types
• Evaluate what historical content to migrate
– We ended up migrating 90% of content
• Convened an organization-wide taxonomy task force
– Reorganized content for topic-based website
– Resulted in 10 topics, 150 site-wide tags, plus 2 additional taxonomies
• Planned for a more visual website
– “Let Data Tell the Story”
– Convened task force to research new ways to visualize our data
– Prepped for ability to feature data graphics in key places on new site
Moving Mountains (of data): Prepping for the Migration

9. • Content migration was an iterative process.
• It’s never too early to clean up your current site and remove content that’s no
longer useful. (This will take longer than you think.)
• Don’t underestimate the amount of time a successful migration will take.
• Prepare for a period of dual entry.
Lessons Learned

10. • Design needed to account for how to present 100+ page reports
online and present reports with heavy use of charts/slides.
• Make fact sheets easy to read, easy for search engines to discover
content and easy to update.
• Present large amounts of data.
• Highlight the stable of Kaiser’s slides.
• Give graphics & interactives more visibility.
Designing for Digital First Strategy

11. • Alley Interactive worked with VIP to develop for kff.org the first
faceted search for elastic search.
• Ability for users to refine by types of content, tags and topics.
• Still user testing.
Search

12. Coming This Month to a
Computer, Tablet, or Phone near you!
Join the Battle
Questions?