The “Washington Center of Excellence for Aerospace and Advanced Manufacturing”—that’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? It is as small an organization as its name is big. Despite its size, its immense mission is to drive the economic competitiveness of the state’s aerospace industry. The Center of Excellence is one of ten industry-specific groups mandated by state law to facilitate collaboration and advancement among employers, researchers, educators, and students. They needed a new website to be easier to manage; provide more meaningful and organized content; and better reflect their evolving brand while remaining within a capped budget and timeline.

Squarespace was initially chosen for the Center of Excellence’s site for its ease of self-serve setup and congruence with the other centers’ sites. The open, “no guardrails” editor experience made it a challenge to keep page formatting consistent and on-brand. It also meant that pages were built to a particular screen size and accessible or responsive views were second thoughts, often generated from Squarespace’s best guess for reflowing content. The difficulty was reflected in usability and navigability, with numerous orphan pages, broken layouts, and missing links.

Writing and image curation is often the biggest challenge in a web project. Luckily, the Center of Excellence has a clear, simple, and straightforward message and mission, even if it wasn’t reflected clearly in the original site. We quickly pulled together a new content map that organized pages and identified gaps that required further copywriting clarifying the organization’s purpose and audiences. Doing so set clear expectations for both D2 and the client that kept the project moving forward.

As a small organization, the Center of Excellence did not have an extensive library from which to curate marketing images. Authenticity—and not just the appearance of it—is especially important in any public-facing communication, so we minimized reliance on stock photography and bolstered the written word with clear iconography and typography.

The center’s blog in Squarespace was not managed in a structured manner. The individual web pages required manual effort to publish and link across the site and missed out on the SEO advantages of being structured, managed, and organized by publication date. As part of the content transition, D2 created tools to scrape the existing site, identify structured data, and enhance the new content map with SEO-friendly and meaningful URLs. This automated process included a clean-up of the ‘messy’ markup from Squarespace and tracked redirections to maintain the SEO value of existing links.

The website we launched at the end of June 2024 was extremely well received. The project came in under budget thanks in large part to the direct working relationship with the Center’s key decision maker. To make use of the remaining allocated funds, D2 continues to make post-launch updates and adjustments based on collected analytics and client requests. We’re proud of the exceptional support we provide and we’re also proud of the work put in on this simple but important tool.