Homeschool.com: From Clutter to Clarity for Overwhelmed Families
Homeschool.com had years of useful content, but families landed on a jumble of menus, side boxes and ads and often left without finding what they came for. The redesign gave the site a new brand, simpler navigation and page templates built to carry its content. The live site still looks very much like it.
Company: Homeschool.com, a long-established content and resource site for homeschooling families
My role: UX designer (sole UX/UI)
Team: Company owner, marketing lead and site owner on the client side; one developer under the head of IT
Timeline: Three months of design in 2020, on a six-month consulting contract. I was offered a permanent role at month three, then handed the designs and requirements to the developer and moved to product work.
Homeschool.com is where families go to learn how to homeschool and find the resources to do it. It has been in business for over 20 years, and that history gave the redesign a strong foundation to build on.
I led the design research, adding my own to the team's earlier findings, and ran the workshops where we settled the brand direction, site map and page templates. I created the logo concept and refined it with the company's graphic designer, then designed the information architecture, page templates and prototypes, and wrote the functional requirement document the developer built from. The redesign also had a goal beyond looks: the editorial team needed to add blog and simple pages themselves, without developer involvement and without the site drifting back into clutter. The first phase moved the site to a new CMS, which is what made editor-built pages possible. Developers built the templates and the custom pages, such as the homepage, About Us and Advertise With Us. The editorial team could build everything else from those templates, which were designed to keep structure consistent.
Who This Was Really For
The site served very different families, each arriving with a different need.
Who visited the site, and what the site offered them
New to homeschooling: worried, looking for where to begin
Experienced homeschoolers, new to the site: browsing for curriculum and resources
Returning members: looking for community
Families in a particular situation: homeschooling a child with special needs, homeschooling secularly, or thrown into emergency homeschooling in 2020
Advertisers: paying for space on the pages
Volunteer bloggers: contributing to the site
In 2020, schools closed and a wave of families found themselves suddenly homeschooling, many with no plan and no tradition behind them. Homeschooling sites have long leaned Christian, so secular families could arrive and feel they didn't belong. Most visitors were women, many of them parents under pressure and new to homeschooling. The site needed to welcome families of any belief or situation, in a tone that felt warm and calm.
The editorial team was a user too. After launch, the editor-in-chief and the writers would publish blog and simple pages themselves, so the templates had to supply the structure. Pages varied from post to post, and a template would make good structure the default, so every page would read clearly as the team added to the site.
Ads were a source of revenue for the business, so a calm, clear experience had to work alongside them. I treated ads as part of the experience: fewer of them, better placed, and none competing with the navigation.
The Problem We Were Solving
The content was strong. The problem was getting to it, making sense of it, and feeling at home once you did.
The old homepage, before the redesign
Too busy and confusing: menus, side boxes and ads competed on every page, ads weren't labeled, and sidebar tiles looked like navigation
No clear starting point: visitors weren't sure where to begin, new homeschoolers most of all
Not everyone felt included: families of children with special needs, secular families, and families who started homeschooling suddenly in 2020 needed a site that spoke to them too
Hard to find things: curriculum and printables were buried, search didn't help, and links to free printables often broke
Content in hard-to-use forms: related links sat inside long paragraphs, and some pages were an inserted PDF with nothing clickable
Not built for phones: the site wasn't responsive
A cold, inconsistent look: no clear brand, and pages varied from one to the next
Together, these problems made strong content hard to reach and hard to browse. The team knew about them from convention feedback, parent tests and an onsite survey, and my own research added a page-by-page walkthrough and a competitive review.
Research & Process
Five weeks of research came before the first wireframe, and each piece shaped what we built.
Site walkthrough and feature inventory: we went through the old site page by page and logged what to keep and what we no longer needed.
Onsite survey of visitors (125 responses): it showed two mindsets, worried newcomers and calm browsers. The new homepage gave newcomers a clear path in and browsers room to wander.
Competitive review of eleven sites: the closest direct competitors, narrowed with the team's guidance and compared factor by factor. Most were either cluttered or clean but corporate, many spoke mainly to Christian families, and almost none made curriculum easy to find. That left room for a site that was clear, warm and welcoming to every kind of homeschooler.
Three workshops with the client team: strategic goals and objectives, design and branding, and information architecture and functionality. I designed and led all three.
Card sort (13 participants): a hybrid sort of 23 content cards, analyzed in a web tool that showed what percentage of participants placed each card in each section. Where they agreed most, such as printables in Resources and local support groups in Community, it shaped the main sections: Getting Started, Community and Resources.
Task flows and main actions: we mapped the steps to reach key content and shortened the long paths, then picked one to three main actions for each user group.
Site map and feature prioritization: we settled the structure before any screens.
The new site map: four main paths and four secondary links
Wireframes, then designs: two rounds each for the homepage, subpages and mobile, ending in a style guide and handoff to development.
The workshops
I designed and led three workshops with the client team. Each was a guided discussion that used examples to move us toward decisions on brand, navigation, and look and feel. Where the team had given me long, scattered documents, I turned them into clear objectives on the slides and asked, during the session, whether I had understood them correctly.
Workshop 1, Strategic Goals and Objectives. We agreed on what the redesign had to achieve and how we would measure success, who the site served, how competitors compared, and where the project could go wrong. For each audience, we picked the one to three actions we most wanted them to take.
Workshop 2, Design and Branding. We worked through the logo, tagline, positioning and style guidelines. Short activities got the team talking about the brand, like guessing a company from its tagline ("Can you hear me now?" is Verizon). Then we looked at the tagline they planned to use, 'Homeschooling and Loving It,' and found it a bit flat. Most of the work was exploring who we are by asking what our value is and what our key benefit is. We judged taglines against four tests: memorable, a clear benefit, different from competitors, and a positive feeling. Words visitors used in the survey helped us land on three brand pillars: welcoming, inspiring and life-changing. I also checked the brand colors for contrast and color blindness before we settled on them.
Workshop 3, Information Architecture and Functionality. We looked at how the content should be organized: the main sections, what belonged on the homepage, and the functionality the site needed, such as forms, search, filters and outside links. This is where the main sections first took shape, including a hub page for parents.
What surprised me most was how open the team was to letting data guide decisions. The owner and team were engaged workshop participants who took the process seriously and responded to the takeaways, which made the work easier.
Decisions & Tradeoffs
Meeting the goals meant giving things up: ad space, a forum, one-off pages, and a search upgrade we couldn't build.
Taking the ad bar out from under the navigation
The old site ran a banner directly beneath the navigation. Advertisers paid for that prime space, but it meant every page opened with an ad instead of content, which made the site feel less trustworthy. I proposed removing it from the main pages, and the owner approved. The new, polished look would have been far less effective with an ad banner across the top.
Giving ads rules instead of "ads go anywhere"
Ads followed the job of each page:
About Us, Advertise With Us and Contact Us got no sidebar ads at all. Each was a page where a visitor came to do one thing: learn who we are, reach us, or become an advertiser. Ads beside them would only compete with that.
Main landing pages: ads moved below the hero, so the first screen belonged to the visitor.
Blog posts and articles: the ad stayed at the top of the sidebar, beside the content people came to read.
A closable ad at the bottom of the page: my recommendation, in place of an ad inside the content. It stayed visible for advertisers, and readers could dismiss it.
Everywhere: ads were labeled and capped at three or four per page, with the sidebar's tiles and graphics counted as one unit.
Responsive ads: from then on, advertisers supplied their ads in responsive sizes, so every placement worked on phone, tablet and desktop. I added the requirement to the advertiser materials and gave the team guidance on what to ask advertisers for.
The pages looked better, but advertisers were not happy. The priority was a better site, and the ads were left to figure out afterward.
Advertising packages, with a View link for each option
What View opens: placement, size and examples
Related links inside a long paragraph
Ready-made Related Blog Posts section
What Changed
A clear way in, a welcoming look, and pages that all feel like one site.
The new homepage, after the redesign
Four clear paths in. Getting Started, Community, Resources and Parent Hub sat right above the hero as main navigation.
• Getting Started: for new families, with state laws, homeschooling methods, secular and faith-based options, how to homeschool high school, and step-by-step guides, so a newcomer could answer "where do I begin?" right away.
• Community: for returning families, with the homeschooling blog and user stories, podcasts and local support groups. A "Get Involved" area invited families to become a product tester or subscribe to emails, and the latest blog posts sat below. Bringing user voices forward was one of the owner's goals.
• Resources: one of homeschoolers' top needs, with a curriculum guide, articles, videos, free printables, product reviews and "Top Picks" lists.
• Parent Hub: much of the same information, organized by what a parent wants to do instead of by topic: find support in your state, see curriculum options, watch tips from real homeschooling moms, explore free printables, or listen to podcasts. It worked like a help desk with shortcuts.
A Getting Started page. It used to be one long page of text with useful links. It became a hub, with easy-to-digest sections and clear navigation, so a new family could see where to go next.
A brand with a point of view. A new logo and three brand pillars: welcoming, inspiring and life-changing. The third came straight from what visitors told us in the survey.
A template system. Templates, from homepage and landing pages to About, Team, Contact and a resource filter, plus the pages every site forgets: 404, site map, print and search results.
Blog pages with structure. A hero with title, date, author and tags, and related articles at the end, so every post looked like it belonged.
A site that works on a phone. In phase 1, the whole site became responsive. I designed the homepage and set the rules for how content wraps: grids, lists and blog pages. Every page followed those rules, and the phase 2 templates inherited them.
Help for long pages. Much of the content is long, so pages got shortcuts: a floating back-to-top button, an in-page menu that jumps to the section a reader needs, and paths to related information so people can keep exploring without hunting.
An Advertise page that sells the site. A cleaned-up version shipped in Phase 1 and a full redesign in Phase 2. I designed a template for each ad option, showing where the ad appears, its exact size, and examples. Competitors' advertising pages were long and confusing, with no stats and no clear way to get in touch.
The old Advertise page, before the redesign
The new Advertise page, after the redesign
The old site felt like being dropped in the wilderness with no map. The new one was meant to feel like a botanical garden: clear entrances, marked paths, a map, and places to rest. A guided visit instead of finding your own way.
Outcomes
Built in 2020. Still the foundation of the site six years later.
• Two phases, both shipped: first a new CMS, a responsive site, a new homepage and Advertise With Us page, then the brand, templates and style guide.
• A warm reception at launch: the owner approved the new look, and the editor-in-chief, who had run the site for years, was the most enthusiastic of all.
• The editorial team built on it: after launch, they added blog and simple pages from the templates without developer involvement, and later built more complex pages using parts of the custom templates.
• Still in place: the four-path navigation stayed as launched for years, and most of the pages I designed are still live today.
• Marketplace, 2023: fitted into the existing design, with links through the pages and a homepage update. The four paths became three: Marketplace, Getting Started and Resources.
I moved into product work after launch, so I don't have post-launch metrics. What I can point to is what shipped and what lasted.
Reflection
Launch isn't the end of the project for the people who keep the site running. I design for them too.
Make the consistent choice the easy one. Guidance helps, but a ready-made section beats a rule. The editorial team didn't need a style lecture. They needed a block they could drop in, and the page came out right without anyone thinking about it. It's on my checklist at the start of every project now.
We met the brief, but the business model was the next problem. The redesign gave families the clear, welcoming site the brief asked for, and it did it by pulling ads back. That changed what advertisers were buying, and they felt it. In hindsight, the moment called for a different advertising strategy too, one built around helping families choose, with recommendations and comparisons, the way large marketplaces do, instead of only space for sale. Advertising strategy wasn't my focus on this project. Looking back, I'd research it earlier and bring recommendations to the table, even when it sits outside my scope.
Write the decision down, or it won't get built. This was my first time writing functional requirements, with guidance from my new supervisor. I wrote the full document, and the developer built from it. A decision that isn't written down can't be checked against what gets built, so I've worked that way ever since.
The homeschooling community was welcoming, and so were the owner and the team I worked with. It made this a great first project.
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