New Georgia Encyclopedia
Georgia’s encyclopedia was disappearing from the internet.
Half its readers gone in four years, a Drupal site aging out, and a rebuild that put the state’s reference work back where people could find it.
SERVICES:
User Research· Information Architecture· UX/UI Design· WordPress Development· SEO
THE PROBLEM
The New Georgia Encyclopedia is the state’s authoritative reference: 2,100+ scholar-written articles on Georgia history, culture, and life, used in classrooms across the state. But between 2016 and 2020 its audience collapsed. Users fell from 2.9 million a year to 1.5 million. Organic search was bleeding out, mobile use was shrinking while the rest of the internet went mobile-first, and the aging Drupal site was expensive to maintain and hard to update.
WHAT WE DID
We started with research, not pixels: interviews with editors, educators, and users, plus a full SEO and analytics teardown to understand where the readers had gone. Then we redesigned the site from the ground up, responsive first, built for how teachers and students actually use it. We migrated all 2,100+ articles out of Drupal into WordPress, redirected every old URL (including the separate mobile subdomain), and gave the editorial team an admin experience they could run without us.
THE OUTCOME
The slide stopped the year the new site launched. Traffic climbed for three straight years, up 78 percent over launch year at its peak, and the year after release the site took home 3 W3 Awards, including the Gold for education sites. We still work with the NGE team today.
I really can’t share enough good things about [Army of Bees] because they’ve been exceptional in every regard.
- of readers lost before the rebuild
- 50%
- traffic growth by year three
- 78%
- W3 awards
- 3
- articles migrated
- 2,100
This could be your case study.
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