After over a year of strategic planning and fundraising, the Human Defense Initiative (HDI) team is excited to announce the unveiling of our redesigned and revamped website, humandefense.com!
This launch has been such a long time coming and it’s so amazing to finally see it come to fruition! Human Defense Initiative has grown so much over the last three years, and the new website represents that in such a big way. We know it will be a great resource for so many, and we are so incredibly thankful for all of the donors and supporters who made this possible.
After much searching for a volunteer to assist with this project, we finally fundraised and decided to hire a freelancer. Within three hours of posting the listing we connected with an amazing website designer named Sarah Hansel. It was very important to us to have someone working on our site who supported our mission, and we were so excited to learn that Sarah Hansel is actually a super pro-life mom of six! She not only brought our designs to life, but also brought new ideas to the table to make our website look even better than we ever thought possible.
To celebrate this project, our leadership team wanted to share their thoughts on the announcement. Continue reading to find out what Skyler Lee (Executive Director), Nick Bell (Communications Director), Petra Wallenmeyer (Content Director), and Sarah Mouradian (Digital Marketing Director) have to say about why a new website was needed, the most exciting new features, as well as future goals!
So, why a new website?
The previous website kept crashing, and no one on the current team knew how to fix it. Furthermore, Human Defense Initiative had outgrown their old website platform.
Skyler: “We had so many customizations we wanted to implement (from drop-downs on the top taskbar to pictures in articles), and our previous website platform just didn’t support that kind of design. Additionally, every time our old website crashed, I was terrified one day we wouldn’t be able to get it back. But by switching everything to WordPress, it’s now super easy to edit and update ourselves.”
Sarah: “Our old website just wasn’t suited to our ever-growing needs. Our previous platform wasn’t able to keep up with the amount of content we were publishing to the website. Frequent crashes were a scary and frustrating time. Not only that, but the previous platform also had very limited design features and functionality options, especially when it came to SEO (search engine optimization) features on the back-end.
It’s important for HDI to show up higher in search results so that we can reach more people about the truth of abortion and truly save lives with information and resources. We needed a website that would load fast, be more secure and reliable, work great on mobile devices, and get visitors engaging with the information they were looking for from the moment they arrived.
With this new website launch, we now have the tools, features, and resources we need to grow our website as HDI grows over the coming years!”
Nick: “As someone who focuses on visuals, our old website was good but could have been more visually appealing. With the ever-changing nature of the internet, I feel like our old website was a bit outdated and needed to have more in common with current sites.”
Our new website package now includes a premium support team which will assist in the event of any issues. We should no longer have any problem with downtime which is great news for not only our readers, but also any potential clients searching the internet for pregnancy help!
Exciting New Features
In addition to more stability, the newly revamped and redesigned Human Defense Initiative website has so many new features which will better serve our readers, supporters, and pregnancy help clients! Here is what the leadership team has to say about the updates:
Petra: “There are so many more editing and formatting options for articles! Headings, italics, bold, super- and subscripts, footnotes…all these features and formatting tools that we didn’t have or didn’t have a wide range of in our previous platform. So I think it is going to help certain types of articles, like longer ones and ones with several citations (looking at you, Daniel Gump), look cleaner and be easier to break into chunks for reading.
I am also really excited that we can start tagging articles, so it will become easier to find articles on specific topics and we have a search bar (FINALLY)!”
Sarah: “The new website simply looks amazing and really elevates the professionalism HDI always strives to present. Everything is also so easily accessible now. From the moment you arrive on our homepage, you know exactly who HDI is, the types of articles you can read, the support resources we provide, how you can stay in touch with us on social media, where you can donate, and how to get involved. An engaging homepage is essential to making sure visitors stick around for a while and read through a few pages and articles, which is not only great for reaching more people, but will help SEO through low bounce rates and high click-through rates!
I also love how our individual article pages look: author bios are easy to read, and related articles are always suggested (on the left and bottom on desktop, and on the bottom on mobile). And to chime in with Petra, we finally have a search bar!”
Nick: “I am most excited about the visuals of our new site. It looks more modern and up-to-date. I love the banner at the top of the homepage that changes in a slideshow type manner displaying our services. I love the circular icons showing our services as well.
I especially love how the leadership team pictures change to our baby pictures when you click on them. I look especially awesome as a baby.”
Skyler: “We have so many new, crisp, and easy-to-navigate features to better serve our supporters, readers, and clients — including a help page to easily connect our clients with crucial resources regarding pregnancy help, material assistance or post-abortive healing, a testimonial page to showcase our impact over the last three years, two FAQ pages answering frequently asked questions relating to both our organization and how one can seek help following a crisis pregnancy, a donate page complete with a monthly giving option, and a search bar for any reader looking for a certain topic.”
The Goals for the Website
Our website will also help us move forward with big plans for the future!
Petra: “By looking more clean and having better ways to search and categorize publications, I hope the website becomes easier to use for people looking for pro-life information. I also am hoping that the redesigned layout and added content for the help section is actually going to be a better help for moms and parents needing aid, or for people who are looking for help for moms or families that they know.”
Skyler: “I hope the new website better serves both our readers and clients. We added a search bar so anyone researching a specific pro-life topic can easily find research on said subject. We also updated our help page which is going to be a part of another big project we’ll be announcing soon (get excited!). The help page turned out beautifully and I hope it helps connect people all across the nation with the help they need whether that’s material assistance, options counseling, help locating a pregnancy center, finding resources on post-abortive healing, etc.”
Sarah: “I’m hoping that people looking for information about abortion and pro-life topics as well as moms and families in need will be more easily able to find HDI. This includes our hundreds of articles, our resource pages, and more! There’s no time to waste when it comes to saving every life and changing every heart and mind that we can. I also hope it will help us connect with more new contributors and partners thanks to our refreshed web presence!”
Special Shoutouts
Having our website running smoothly is a must since we are a digital-based organization so thank you all for making this website redesign possible! We’d like to thank everyone who assisted us in this process including our donors, supporters, and contributors. This project truly required a team effort to complete!
Skyler: “First and foremost, I want to thank our donors and supporters, without you we would have never been able to make this website a reality. Secondly, I want to give a special shoutout to our website designer Sarah Hansel at Glory Rose Media Group for designing such a beautiful site and bringing our vision to life! It was amazing to draw mockups and then see her bring them into reality. I also want to thank Gy Ben-Yaakov, the website developer who assisted us with the migration of the website. Additionally, I want to thank each of our contributors and leaders who came to the rescue and helped us reformat all 700+ of our articles by hand when we discovered that’s what had to be done due to no fault of our own or the wonderful website professionals we worked with. It was a tedious task, however if the pro-life fight was ever easy they wouldn’t call it a fight. Working with both Sarah Hansel and Gy as well as having help from the leadership team and contributors made the project go so much more smoothly even when working to overcome the obstacles.”
Petra: “We also want to thank our contributors for sticking with us. This project took up the lion’s share of my time and effort with HDI the past few months, so things like editing and interacting with you all slowed down a lot. I am happy we have officially launched, and I can get back to working with you all.”
Sarah: “Without all of you, none of this would be possible! Thank you for your continued support of us — whether that be through being a contributor, reading and sharing our articles, following us on social media, connecting moms in need with us, or generously donating. After all, we’re a 100% volunteer-based pro-life organization.
The fact that only through your support were we able to get a new website that will actually work and serve our mission for years to come is mind-blowing! So, again, the entire leadership team and I cannot thank you enough.”
Nick: “Thank you for three years of continued support, donations, and engagement online. Thank you for helping us to get our name out there so that people know to turn to us in their times of need.”
As always thank you for supporting our mission and helping us make abortion unthinkable.
Note: Since you’re already on our website humandefense.com, we highly encourage you to look around and share your thoughts about the new design with us on social media @humandefenseini or drop us a note HERE.
