Digital Agency Sought By The Animal Medical Center (AMC)
The Animal Medical Center (AMC) in New York City is accepting proposals to redesign and develop their website. The deadline for RFP submissions is December 1, 2017 at 5:00pm ET. S
Our current website, www.amcny.org, was launched in January 2016 and runs on WordPress with a custom template. This site’s CMS was on Drupal prior to this most recent redesign. The website is maintained in-house by the Director of Digital Communications. For this project, we want to partner with a developer to build a new site that offers an excellent user experience, is state-of-the-art and visually compelling, is interactive, easy to navigate, and optimizes SEO.
Background:
The Animal Medical Center is a federally recognized 501(c)(3) non-profit veterinary center that has been a national leader in animal care since 1910. We are currently the largest non-profit animal hospital in the nation and recently launched the Usdan Institute for Animal Health Education to inform and educate the public on pet health information.
As an academic veterinary hospital, AMC promotes the health and well-being of companion animals through advanced treatment, research and education. Our staff is comprised of nearly 100 veterinarians who utilize an interdisciplinary team approach in our Elmer and Mamdouha Bobst Hospital, combining expertise in more than 17 key specialties and services to care for pets 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
AMC provides medical care for nearly 50,000 patient visits annually. Approximately, 60% of our clientele comes from referring veterinarians. Our hospital is one of the largest teaching hospitals in the world, committed to pioneering effective therapies, seeking safer and more accurate methods to diagnose illnesses, and advancing medical and veterinary knowledge through a variety of clinical and academic programs. Our current website averages over 53,000 pageviews and 18,000 active users per month, with approximately 70% being new visitors, most originating via organic search. We currently have a $10K monthly Google AdWords Grant, which is being managed in-house.
Scope of Work:
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
The goal for AMC is to create a website that our users will find easy to use, with intuitive navigation, the technology to integrate our online giving through Network For Good or other provider, allow for comprehensive site search, facilitate content creation and editing, house a calendar of events system, and create an overall inviting and engaging web design interface that effectively communicates who we are and our various capabilities to all of our audiences. We would like to continue using WordPress as a CMS, allowing for in-house maintenance and upgrades of themes, plugins and WordPress version updates.
The website should be accessible to all our visitors. It should have a responsive, mobile-ready design that will adjust to any screen and be retina-ready. We also need to ensure that our website is ADA- compliant. We would also like to explore the option of language translation options for our site, although this is not an immediate need.
The site should be visually pleasing with a clean, modern design that reflects our status in the veterinary industry, while still appealing to pet lovers and conveying warmth. It should be representative of our services and capabilities, while matching our existing branding. We have a library of images that can be utilized to reflect the diversity of the animals we treat.
Our website must be optimized for search. Our site should be submitted to the appropriate search engines; tags, titles and keywords should be placed appropriately throughout the site; and our content structure, linking strategies, and sitemap should ensure consistent natural search engine page rankings. The developer should have knowledge of SEO or a recommended vendor to manage SEO on an ongoing basis, as well as provide insight, advice and potential management for our Google AdWords Grant.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Our target audiences are varied; the largest, being pet owners/lovers. Our audience also consists of the veterinary community (referring veterinarians and veterinarians and veterinary professionals seeking continuing education) and our donors. Our clientele runs the gamut socioeconomically, so we need to be able to reach a variety of visitors.
WEBSITE CONTENT
The bulk of the content currently found on www.amcny.org will be migrated to the new site. We are identifying pages that will not be carried over, although we may not have all pages identified upon launch. AMC will be responsible for content review prior to migration. We will seek guidance from the developer for any content rewrites based on search engine optimization recommendations.
PROJECT REQUIREMENTS
This is not a comprehensive list of all functionality that the site will have, but it provides a representative idea of our expectations:
- A user-centered approach to web design and development
- A responsive design that adjusts our content to fit on screens of any size
- A retina-ready site
- An ADA-compliant site
- Integration with 3rd party services (currently Network For Good and rVetLink)
- A clean and modern design that fits with our existing style guide
- A site that reflects our status in the veterinary industry, while still appealing to pet lovers
- Intuitive navigation and information architecture that makes our content easy to access
- A comprehensive site search
- Potential options to translate pages into foreign languages
Due Date:
December 1, 2017.
Address:
5WPR and Rubenstein PR have previously represented Animal Medical Center.
