High-impact site for a critical cause.

The OSET Institute is a U.S. based nonprofit organization that is on a non-partisan mission to protect democracy worldwide with accessible, open source voting technology. In addition to their education and advocacy work, OSET facilitates cutting-edge technological research and development, always in service of their goal of safeguarding free and fair elections from the threats posed by private ownership of ballot-casting tech. OSET Institute founder Greg Miller has also served as somewhat of a spokesperson for the cause worldwide, and has been called upon for expert commentary in hundreds of media publications.

LightPress originally built the OSET website on Squarespace 7.0 years ago, and it still looked passable for a small nonprofit when we began our 2022 rebuild. But as support and funding for the cause had grown amid public concerns about election fraud, Greg Miller realized that the organization needed a more sophisticated web presence that could reflect OSET’s true authority and widen its sphere of influence online.

In this re-launch on Squarespace 7.1, we essentially wanted to achieve a top-to-bottom re-brand, elevating OSET’s entire look and feel while creating a durable design system that could help organize future content creation for years to come. Together with the OSET marketing team, who had already re-designed the logo and created a few mockups, we envisioned an “updated classic” aesthetic inspired by old school broadsheet newspaper banners. We had to find the sweet spot between something contemporary and something timeless, to reflect a sense of historical gravity continually revealing itself in the present day.

Second, the page content from the old website needed to basically be dumped out on the table and completely re-organized for a more cohesive user experience.

Lastly, while we knew the main plan was to continue helping OSET with Squarespace website maintenance in an ongoing way, we still also needed to ensure that staff members could manage occasional updates and blog posts on their own in the event of a time-sensitive news blast.

Aside from carrying out OSET’s new high-impact design aesthetic, our biggest challenge was in managing a total re-work of the content strategy while improving the website’s search engine presence. To prepare for the site build, we worked in direct collaboration with Greg to create a new site map and spreadsheet index of all the new pages with neatly structured architecture.

For SEO, in addition to our usual meticulous meta-data writing, we did a thorough accounting of all the old website’s URLs to ensure that each core page was mapped to a new one. Having a website with this many existing backlinks out on the web and social media meant that OSET needed to ensure that the thousands of trails leading back to it would still actually take users where they had intended to go.

For OSET’s robust blog, which we ported over to the new site, we designated new categories to cover all the types of news, installing the handy Universal Filter plugin to most effectively showcase filtered results.

Once those foundational organizing tasks were completed and the basic design scheme was settled, it was time to sprinkle the magic dust: high-impact brand messaging that truly makes our services stand out.

While Greg is a prolific and highly quotable writer, he knew that his expository style was better suited to the articles, sound bytes, and interviews he does so well. In the current era of digital marketing, in which the spread of information is dominated by whoever can attract the most attention in the least amount of time, websites have just a few seconds to make visitors feel something that convinces them to stay a while. So, the LightPress team wrote most of the attention-grabbing headlines and home page copy that draws site visitors into an instant connection with the subject matter.

OSET’s board was thrilled with this upgrade, but their opinions aren’t the true test of the impact of the website redesign. If you search Google for “open source voting” and other similar terms, you can clearly see that OSET’s domain has gained a tremendous amount of traction in the algorithm since the re-launch on Squarespace 7.1.