Award-winning, mobile-first website improved city-wide vocational education awareness

Pennsylvania CareerLink® Philadelphia is in partnership with the PA Department of Labor and Industry and Human Services, along with various direct-service providers, employers, and more—to support those who ensure Philadelphians are work-ready and have access to opportunities. Their new regional platform is designed to provide better assistance for career seekers and businesses hoping to hire quality candidates.

The problem

PA CareerLink® Philadelphia needed a mobile-first solution and a cohesive representation of their brand online. Their old website had unclear messaging and a poor user experience that contained many accessibility issues. Users couldn’t figure out what steps they needed to take next. Additionally, the website structure was poor, and hundreds of technical errors negatively affected their SEO. The brand was stunted, and their awareness, critical for any community service provider, was low. The website needed a better site structure, rebranding, development, and clear resources to link workforce system providers and programs to help its users.

The solution

Key Medium designed and streamlined the platform for career seekers. We developed a much-improved award-winning experience with a mobile-first design featuring engaging components and subtle personalization. 

Before this project, Key Medium hadn’t developed a gamified version of a website that featured subtle personalizations, so it stretched our creativity in a fun way. We believe in this cause and wanted to help create a mobile-first solution to help career-seekers take action towards finding a job.

We restructured and redesigned the website, making it easy to find the correct information such as where to find a job, career discovery and exploration, skills training, additional supports and benefits, and upcoming workshops.

For their secondary audience, businesses, we have clarified how business partners can get help with hiring people in the talent pipeline.

Overall, the two sides of the website now work in conjunction. Job seekers can find the correct information, and companies looking to hire those people know where to go. Right from the homepage, action tiles are prompting either individuals or employers ‘I’m looking to…’ with several options of where to go next from finding a job, training, and applying for disability services for individuals to searching for talent, viewing labor market data, and learning about industry partnerships for businesses. The website’s menus and buttons are clear with graphical interface elements.

Design strategy and user Experience

Here are some of the design strategies we implemented in the new redesign.

Complete custom website redesign and development

• SEO
• Mobile-first website development with a custom WordPress theme
• User experience design
  • with material design principles
  • gamification
  • website personalization for users who submit lead forms
• Web design and development

SEO and digital strategy

• Before launch, we met with stakeholders and constituents, including individuals working within the PA CareerLink workforce system and experts and consultants
• Conducted a rapid deep dive into the analytics and brand immersion through market research
• Brand identity design (based on State guidelines)
• Web analytics and Google Data Studio implementation and data unification into a tailored dashboard to measure metrics like Vocational Skills Training (VST) requests system-wide.

The results

The results we achieved are as follows.

• 25% lift in traffic by sessions YoY
• 48% increase in user acquisition YoY
• 36% increase in organic traffic YoY
• 4+ million organic impressions in Google Search
• 146K+ users
• 444K+ page views
• Real-time data points and performance tracking in a unified 24/7 accessible analytics dashboard with an associated, easy-to-understand executive scorecard
• Self-service forms, measurement of goals in alignment with workforce development strategy, and integration of City-wide efforts and adjacent initiatives
• Increased conversion rate in line with the workforce development goals:
  • Generated over 1,300 new leads for upskilling individuals (via Vocational Skills Training) with their first personalized, self-service form and another 3.5K from those interested
  • Over 31K outbound referrals from the site and 38K to a state resource.
  • Over 6.7K people called a phone number from the site via mobile
  • Generated interest from 155+ businesses seeking workforce solutions

Awards

We received four internationally-acclaimed awards for the new PA CareerLink Philadelphia platform.

1. 2019 COMMUNICATOR AWARDS DISTINCTION, Features-User Experience for Websites
2. 2019 COMMUNICATOR AWARDS DISTINCTION, Websites – General-Employment for Websites
3. 2019 HERMES CREATIVE AWARDS GOLD, Web-Mobile Information Experience
4. 2019 MUSE CREATIVE AWARDS GOLD, Website- Employment

Does your website need strategic branding and website development? Reach out to us today.