The Community College of Philadelphia’s website, ccp.edu, is a vital resource for students, faculty and parents. According to Website Manager and Information Architect Jason Stein, ccp.edu is “...our communication medium; it’s our heartbeat.”

Since 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has worked to defend individual freedom. The organization’s flagship website, aclu.org, plays a vital role in fundraising and keeping the public informed. 

Engineering, architectural, environmental, and construction company HDR is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. Since its inception in 1917, the company has grown to be the largest employee-owned company of its type, with over 10,000 employees in 225 locations worldwide. HDR’s team of scientists, economists, builders, analysts, and artists is dedicated to creating high-performance buildings and smart infrastructure that make the world a better place.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) wanted to deepen their visitors’ engagement with the art on display. They engaged Palantir three months before a major exhibition to create an interactive website that would extend each exhibit into the virtual world beyond museum walls.

This goal gave birth to the concept of “Digital Stories”—interactive microsites with visual, audio, and written content.

Higher education websites face a unique set of challenges. Not only do they need to accommodate a high volume of traffic, but they also need to house content for multiple audiences, from students and parents to faculty and staff.

Meeting the needs of each of these audiences is a shared challenge across IT and communications departments. Multiple stakeholders need to work together to make sure everyone’s needs are met by a reliable, robust, and responsive website.

WABE is the public media voice of Atlanta. With a 75-year history, this NPR and PBS member station has a combined monthly audience of more than a million viewers, listeners and readers. Modernizing its web properties for a discerning audience with expectations raised by the latest media tech advances has been no small feat. But with Pantheon and its strategic partner agency IfThen, WABE aspires to become a digital news hub powered by modern principles of user experience, design and web operations.

Founded in 1583, the University of Edinburgh is one of the oldest universities in the world. A public research school, it has long been at the forefront of major discoveries in chemistry, biology, physics and geology. From Charles Darwin and Alexander Bell to Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, the university has a fair share of the world’s greatest movers and shakers.

The Wildlife Trusts is a UK grassroots federation comprised of dozens of individual charities. It was founded over 100 years ago to bring about nature’s recovery and inspire people to take action for wildlife. The big task of protecting and restoring wildlife habitats falls on almost a million members and the federation’s 50 websites. 

It’s a good bet that most people don’t think much about their local government website. Until it rains. Or pours. Consider this story of Martin County, Florida. 

If you own and operate a website for your business, the main factor that will determine how many people return to the site is how easy it is to use and navigate. If the website is quick to respond to commands and doesn’t take more than a second or two to load each page then you can expect visitors to spend more time on it. Studies show 40% of visitors abandon websites that take any longer than three seconds to load.