Leslie Forman
July 2, 2015 — By Leslie Forman

Redesigning Jennifer Massoni Pardini’s Virtual Home, Powered by Empathy & WordPress

How might a writer wrap a soft (virtual) blanket around the people who most need her story? Building on a solid foundation of blog posts and heart photos, I collaborated with Jennifer Massoni Pardini to redesign her website to better serve grieving parents and build a new foundation for the next steps in her writing career.

How might a writer wrap a soft (virtual) blanket around the people who most need her story? Building on a solid foundation of blog posts and heart photos, I collaborated with Jennifer Massoni Pardini to redesign her website to better serve grieving parents and build a new foundation for the next steps in her writing career.

“The process was smooth, clear, well-paced, and frankly a joy (it’s nothing short of a thrill to see a creative, heartfelt vision come to life).”

Over the course of one month, with the bulk of the work concentrated into a one-day sprint, we migrated her site from Blogger to WordPress and redesigned the navigation to enable a better browsing experience, especially for those who most need stories like hers.

Background

Jennifer Massoni Pardini headshot 300x300Jennifer Massoni Pardini is a writer, editor, mother and heart collector. She and I met when we lived in the same neighborhood of Santiago, Chile. I’m a longtime reader of Jennifer’s blog, where she started off by writing about newlywed life in Chile. Her story took a sudden turn when she and her husband lost their first child, Lorenzo, in the second trimester. She is now parenting after loss and writing about the journey in publications such as The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Literary Mama.

The Challenge

Jennifer with baby Hazel

Nearly five years after starting her blog, Jennifer noticed that her stats had dropped off. She’d been posting less frequently after the birth of her daughter Hazel in 2014,  and she wanted to make the site more accessible to the people who most need to hear her story: parents facing a similar loss.

Jennifer is writing a memoir called Lorenzo’s Heart: The Anatomy of a Decision, so this site and the community she’s built have the potential to be a major asset in her pitches to editors, agents and publishers.

In her words:

The inspiration for the overhaul was two-fold. One, I needed to bring my blog into the present and make it easier to navigate and connect across communities. Two, writing after loss is not simply the evolution of my life; it’s my creative enterprise. It may even be my life’s work. For now, I’ve stopped wondering for how long it will be and have embraced that it simply is.

My goal in sharing our story is the same today as it was when I first told it: to help other parents walking in shoes like ours. With that in mind, you’ll find that this site talks directly to those parents and those seeking to help them. My aim is to make it easier for those searching for stories like theirs—as I did and do—to find me and consider me a friend in solidarity. Part of grief is feeling alone in it, but I hope to minimize the time it takes to realize that you’re actually not. That directness is not at the exclusion of other readers. I hope anyone interested will find value here. That may be the toughest balance to strike as a writer: providing something of the universal through a singular experience.  [more]

Our Process

I started with a thorough content audit of Jennifer’s Blogger site and the Chain-Link Heart Project, where she photographs the hearts she finds in the world and invites everyone to send in their own. She sent me links to favorite sites: Modern Loss and Nicole Belanger.  I noted that both sites are built in WordPress, with plenty of white space, right sidebars and serif fonts. The sidebar on Modern Loss is especially effective at helping readers find more to read.

These sites and initial conversations inspired a series of quick sketches.

sketches for Jennifer Massoni Pardini dot com

My next step was to choose the right Wordpress theme to highlight Jennifer’s writing and heart photos: Pohutukawa.

Do all things with kindness

Next: colors. Jennifer had taken Abby Kerr’s Voice Values quiz, and came up with Love and Transparency as her top values. I directed her to Abby’s Pinterest boards for these Voice Values, where she chose this image (source). She asked to use turquoise in Lorenzo’s honor.

To create the favicon (the small icon you can see in your browser tab), Jennifer sketched hearts  and scanned them in. I then circled my favorites and sent them to a designer on Fiverr, who made the icon.

handwritten hearts and babyheart favicons in three sizes

Next Jennifer sent me a selection of favorite photos she’d taken for the Chain-Link Heart Project. I cropped these into the dimensions specified by the Pohutukawa theme, noticing that photos with deep colors and high resolution looked best. cropped header images

With all the key assets in place, Jennifer and I met on Skype to collaborate on the site’s installation. (I prefer to work face-to-face — much more efficient than going back and forth over email.)

While she watched over Skype, I migrated the full site from Blogger to WordPress.

Once all of her content was in place, we set up the site’s navigation to speak directly to Jennifer’s core audience — grieving mothers, fathers, and couples — and focus on the specific keywords that these readers might use while searching for stories like hers.

For example, the word “miscarriage” is far more common than “stillbirth” or “heartbreaking decisions” (which makes sense since 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage) and to reach as many readers as possible it’s important to use the most common terms.

Together we optimized the widgets in the site’s sidebar to ensure easy access to five years of blog posts, with a focus on helping her core audience to feel less alone in grief, while also highlighting the wide range of topics she’s written about over the years.

Results

In Jennifer’s words:

“Before getting started, I was pretty overwhelmed at the thought of redesigning my site. Since attending BinderCon L.A., a professional development conference, in March, I knew it was time for an overhaul. I both wanted my site to look as professional as possible as my main writing platform, but I also needed it to speak to the baby loss community and therefore be warm, compassionate, and inviting. I wanted my readers to feel like they had found a trustworthy friend and a resource—someone who was far enough along the path of grieving to have vetted articles and other sites that could help. I knew I was going to have to teach myself a lot about web design in order to pull it off, so I felt such relief when Leslie offered to help.

 

The process was smooth, clear, well-paced, and frankly a joy (it’s nothing short of a thrill to see a creative, heartfelt vision come to life). Leslie is a skilled communicator, both over email and chat, as we were often touching base daily about our creative and collaborative approach to the design as well as the technical steps required to set up hosting and prepare for the site transfer. When it came time to “meet” on Skype, Leslie was prepared and efficient. If we hit a snag, as is bound to happen during such a massive undertaking, Leslie handled it calmly, promptly, and successfully. In so doing, I stayed calm during a process that would have surely been frustrating were I to have done it on my own. I dare say the process was stress-free from start to finish!

 

Since announcing the relaunch, I’ve been so moved by the feedback. Immediately, a couple of friends told met they had passed it along to others in need of this kind of support, which was the main goal of the redesign and produced an immediate sense of success. One colleague called me “fearless,” which served to remind me just how powerful our vulnerability is when we harness it for good. A family member thanked me for continuing to share my story and let me know how privileged she feels to be hearing it. “Clear” was the one word that kept coming up from a design perspective. One editor wrote, “It’s very clear what the focus and message of your blog is, so that’s great. Plus, it will be easy for journalists and editors to find you, sample your work, and reach out if they’d like to hire you for a piece. It’s professional and streamlined. Smart move!” Considering two assignments came my way in the first 24 hours of the relaunch, I’d have to say she’s right. I notice I also used “clear” to describe the process of working with Leslie. That illustrates how important clarity is behind the scenes in order to produce it in a product.

 

Bottom line, three years out from my loss, I am re-energized to continue helping other parents in my shoes. I think that energy results from and contributes to my site and the opportunity for healing it allows. Thank you, Leslie!”

She also earned well-deserved praise from experts in the field:

I look forward to hearing about the next steps in her writing career!

Also, if you’re looking to redesign your website, I’d love to chat with you about it. Please feel free to email me: leslieforman [at] gmail [dot] com :)