The Gerson Institute is a health organization that promotes and spreads awareness for Gerson Therapy—a method of helping the body heal itself naturally to treat chronic conditions and degenerative diseases like cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and allergies. They are a global source of information, licensing, training, and patient support for individuals needing treatment.
The Gerson Institute provides several resources to patients but needed to find a way to create a better educational experience on their website. The current site was outdated, content-heavy, and lacked overall functionality. With a better user journey in mind, Gerson Institute partnered with Media Cause to optimize their user experience in order to better serve users who turned to them for educational health information and related services.
After meeting with the Gerson Institute team, we learned just how challenging their site was to navigate for their users. The site had a lot of content that was difficult to find. Moreover, it was unclear to users what Gerson Institute’s mission was and what they actually did. Gerson wanted to create an experience that was not only user-friendly, but also portrayed the warm and approachable brand they are, as well.
Additionally, Gerson wanted to create an experiential learning experience by leveraging key technology platforms to further engage with and market health products to users.
To modernize the Gerson Institute’s website, first, we completed an audit of their current site. This review helped us develop a content strategy to provide users with clear and comprehensive information about the organization and what they offer. We then improved the user journey and recommended sitemap updates. A simpler navigation plan made all of the critical information easier to locate.
Next, we revamped the Gerson Institute’s brand to bring in visual elements to make the website more welcoming and appealing. And by updating the imagery and iconography with visuals that had a friendlier tone, we made the website look eye-catching. These changes allowed their target audiences—patients, potential patients, and advocates—to feel more at ease while exploring their site.
Because the Gerson Institute wanted to leverage different marketing tools on their website, we had our MarTech teamwork on strategy and planning efforts to assist them. This way they got the most out of these marketing technologies.
In collaboration with the Gerson Institute’s team, we reimagined their website. After auditing their current site, we started with developing and implementing a content strategy, information architecture, and new navigation. By revising the site’s existing sitemap and navigation, we were able to create a new, seamless user experience. This was done by putting the navigation items as landing pages and creating subpages with related content and housing them under those higher-level web pages.
To improve the organization’s content, the Gerson Institute’s team refreshed and condensed their existing copy so that it could be migrated to the new site. The revised copy made their content simple to read and not overwhelm their users while consuming the information.
Additionally, with the new content and page layout, the user journey was streamlined—having decreased from five clicks down to one to take key actions.
As one of the main goals of this website rebuild was to build an effortless and engaging online experience, the Media Cause team worked on integrating their marketing technologies. Together, we set up Shopify and Quickbooks for eCommerce, Google Analytics, Yoast SEO Plugin, Email Signup, Forms, and CRM.
The final stage of the website process was to enhance the visual design of the website. Gerson Institute largely focuses on educating people about natural treatment of ailments and diseases, so we wanted to make their site more brighter and welcoming to reflect their positive tone. We did this by adding watercolor illustrations and textured motif backgrounds to give the website a warmer look and feel. Some of the previous colors on the site were utilized but softened to complement these design changes. To make the content easier to read, we updated the font to one that was visually friendly and lightweight. While we did not change the logo, we did adjust it to include the new font—giving everything a cohesive and clean look.
Once all of these elements came together, we tested the finished site with Quality Assurance before launching it.
