Pink-hued city skyline with tall buildings and a hazy atmosphere, sun visible in the sky.

Optimizing a search engine for a non-profit.

Women’s Voices Now Inc.

A laptop displaying the Women's Voices Now website with film posters under Our Staff Picks and Film Festival Winners sections.

My Role as a Designer

My client at Women's Voices Now needed help optimizing their Ajax Search Bar plugin on WordPress. By accessing the backend of their site, I was able to implement changes to improve the usability of their search bar.

Problem

At the beginning of my project, Women's Voices Now had a non-functional search bar. Users landed on a page with a search bar that provided no categories or suggestions to choose from.

The webpage belongs to Women’s Voices Now, featuring navigation tools, a search bar, donation and newsletter buttons, social media icons, and sections for home, about, team, board, media, upcoming events, filmmaker resources, and film collection.

Solution

Screenshot of the Women's Voices Now website showing search filters, a search bar, and four film category thumbnails under 'Our Staff Picks'.

By categorizing the different films I was able to introduce integrated taxonomy and create various sections for users to select when searching for films.

  • WordPress

  • Ajax Search Pro

  • Elementor

  • GoogleMeet

Tools

My Role

  • UX/UI designer

  • Developer

Timeline

  • 2 weeks

Design Process

Once I programmed the search bar to include integrated taxonomy for the different categories of films, I moved on to styling the search bar using the theme & styling functions in the Ajax Search Pro plugin. My goal was to create a visual identity that was aligned with the brand’s values and message. Also, I’ve checked the competition and took a deep dive into my catalog of references for inspiration.

  • The icons used across the site are round.

  • The colors are vibrant and attention-grabbing.

  • Other pages referenced the ability to filter by language, region, category, and subject.

Black and white promotional image of women, with one woman sitting on a bed and two others sitting nearby, with a text overlay saying "Postcards from the Orient," 2020, Isis Gurdal. To the right, a white box with bold text saying "Discover empowering films" and a pink "Search" button below.
Screenshot of a website's frontend search settings page showing various configuration tabs, including 'General Options,' 'Multisite Options,' and 'Categories & Taxonomy Terms.' The section displayed allows users to select taxonomies and drag terms like 'filmcategories,' 'language,' 'region,' and 'subjects' into a list of terms to include for search filtering.

By utilizing the Ajax Search Pro Plugin on WordPress, I organized specific categories to be shown on the search bar settings.

Integrated Taxonomies

Learnings

Throughout this project, I learned how to utilize the backend of WordPress as well as which plugins were beneficial for the success of an optimized search bar. By using Elementor I learned how to layout the front end of the site and tie it in with the custom codes I created on the backend. These tools were extremely useful and I hope to use them again in the future!

Screenshot of the Women's Voices Now website, showing a search bar, filtering options, and a section called 'Our Staff Picks' with four film thumbnails, each featuring a woman or group of women.

"Working with Abigail is a breeze! Her UI and UX experience were showcased on this project. She fixed issues on our film collection and improved its design and features with no previous experience of our CMS & plugins! We are glad we went with Abigail for this project."

— Lamine A.

Digital Growth Strategist at Women's Voices Now

A woman with curly hair looks through a professional camera outdoors, with a house and trees in the background.
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