Revitalizing the Website for Adhikaar, a Women-Led Community and Workers’ Center in New York
Overview
Adhikaar, meaning “rights” in Nepali, is a women-led community and workers’ center in NYC that provides direct services to the Nepali-speaking community and organizes low-income workers and impacted community members to promote social justice and human rights. In 2024 reimagine collective partnered with Adhikaar to redesign their website, which largely had not been updated since 2010. Adhikarr’s primary goals for the website included highlighting their work and impact for potential funders, providing important resources for community members, and updating the site to visually reflect their ethos as a grassroots, membership-led group consisting of workers and organizers.
Our Approach
Working closely with Adhikaar’s Communications team, we began with a discovery session, followed by a thorough website audit that revealed duplicate pages, improperly named URLs, and dozens of hidden pages that were slowing the website down with a load time of 14.19 seconds.
Streamlining Navigation & Site Structure
The navigation consisted of several anchor links to sections on the homepage, such as About Us and Our Work — a key opportunity for us to create individual landing pages and build out the content to better showcase the information Adhikaar wanted to present to their audiences. We streamlined the navigation and site structure by combining pages (such as Blog and News, which were functionally similar) and moving pages under more relevant categories (the Team landing page, for example, moved from under Get Involved to About).
Refreshing the Visual System
To bring a more modern look to the website, we expanded the visual branding system by adding more colors to the official palette, which consisted of two main colors (blue and red), browns, and dark grey. We added a sunny yellow that was already being used in their collateral and adjusted the red to a more vibrant shade that better matched the Nepali flag. Using the new colors, we tweaked the logo for an overall brighter, friendlier look.
Getting the Technical Details Right
We migrated the website from WordPress to Squarespace, importing dozens of blog posts, renaming the badly named URLs (such as “5246”), and remapping the old URLs to the new ones to avoid any broken links. For a more seamless, intentional look, we implemented custom CSS and JavaScript for features such as an animated number counter, stylized embedded forms, and expandable content cards.
Adhikaar Homepage: Before
Adhikaar Homepage: After
Impact
Through its new navigation, page structure, and visual system, the website better showcases the organization’s mission, work, and 20-year impact in the Nepali-speaking community. Funders and elected officials can easily find information about the organization, while community members can access resources such as newsletters and reports, which have been appropriately named and tagged by category. Additionally, images of newsletters have been replaced with actual text, making these pages much more optimal for SEO and accessibility purposes.
Since its launch, the website’s load time has improved significantly, dropping by 64%. Pageviews have also increased by 75%. The top visited pages are Homepage, About, and Our Work — the latter two did not exist as pages previously — and point to an interest in the organization’s mission, vision, and services.
Adhikaar’s new website is faster, easier to navigate, and provides vital information to funders and community members. Its refreshed visual identity is expressive, bold, and authentic, with photos that reflect a vibrant, powerful community of organizers and workers.
