Our work on Recognizing Nurses OK was a similar crunch time job to Best of OKC Preps with many of the same contacts. Within our larger nationwide parent news company Gannett, each local newspaper affiliate across the country would hold special awards ceremonies after a public nomination window. A district “rival” newspaper in another state had setup their website for the event and was siloing their technology and not sharing any of their assets or platforms with our agency. It was a petty thing driven by political infighting between these rival news organizations (even though they shared the same parent company), but it put our own local marketing division in yet another pinch to come up with a fitting web solution with a short two week turnaround. Since we’d delivered for Best of OKC Preps we were asked if we could help them again.
The firm deadline was for similar reasons. They needed to send an email campaign to health care contacts who would be driving the nomination process and they couldn’t put off development any further. Luckily, there were some technology pieces already in place and we could use off-the-shelf themes and plugins for the rest. The actual nomination functionality would be powered by tech that Gannett already owned and configured that would work directly with their email campaign system. They didn’t have an oEmbed, but had a de-branded and iFrame-friendly page we could nest within a content page. With that doing the heavy lifting of the functionality we were able to focus on the design.
When we’d built the Best of OKC Preps site the focus was on letting the rich photo galleries and detailed homepage be the showcase. However, our focus for this website was going to be on blowing our sister agency’s design out of the water. Essentially, our clients wanted to spite them for hoarding their logos, clip arts, plugins, platform and more by showing them we could do better on our own. My agency was a degree removed from the politics and rivalry, but understood that looks mattered and needed to have a hook that would be more impactful than the competition, and we could use their existing site as the standard benchmark to beat.
A theme was decided upon that everything would revolve around a heart shape. Immediately, loads of heart-shaped stress balls were sourced as swag for the event to tie in with the website. We complemented images of the heart-shaped ball with images of diverse groups of stock model nurses and doctors making heart shapes with their hands which we found on Adobe Stock. There were enough images to get some good mileage on the few pages we had planned, and it allowed us to take sparse content and make it “pop” more.
Bright color schemes and backgrounds behind the photos gave the site a sunny and optimistic feeling. A countdown ticker to the close of nominations was added to the homepage’s hero area to encourage some urgency in making nominations or voting for existing nominees. Once the counter hit zero it was replaced with announcements about attending the event and how to purchase tickets.
Platform wise, everything was based upon WordPress’s Gutenberg blocks to make content changes easy as event details were still being pinned down as the nomination process was ongoing. This would prove to be wise as the Covid-19 pandemic would begin its first wave just as the nurse nominations came to an end which caused the actual awards ceremony to be rescheduled and delayed several times. Keeping the information current could be done in minutes without involving developers.
Overall, the website served its purpose as a cheery-looking hub celebrating healthcare providers who put in their all even before Covid put them even more in the spotlight. We were pleased that our design was received as an improvement over our clients’ agency rivals and had been assembled in a short timeframe but without cutting corners.
