MyJewishLearning.com

The My Jewish Learning (MJL) mission—to provide educational resources about Judaism and Jewish life—was hampered by a legacy website that was neither mobile friendly nor easy to navigate. Inspired by their new logo, MJL came to 10up looking for a website redesign that would showcase a new online brand atop a more organized content structure.

The new MJL needed a canonical resource that clearly defined their new digital visual identity. 10up created an online style guide that informed and supported consistent visual design and art direction and lives on to inform future design work.

While search engine traffic was high for MJL, visits were shallow; visitors would enter the site, consume content on their entry page, then quickly leave. Improving recirculation came with its own challenges: MJL had ample content, but it was not organized by defined categories or any other taxonomy; even topic pages were manually created by the editorial team. To increase editorial productivity and content discoverability, 10up mapped the existing content to newly created categories, paving the way for a more rational site navigation and better-related content logic.

Before the redesign, videos were embedded directly into content, with no overarching programmatic organization. The new site includes a custom post type for videos, so that engaging video content can be better featured in the design, for instance, replacing featured images.

Support for Hebrew typography was vital, particularly for a user-friendly citation feature. 10up integrated custom tooltip citations using Sefaria: a non-profit that provides a free Jewish text library, in Hebrew and English. When a Hebrew term or biblical reference is clicked, Sefaria offers Hebrew translations and definitions. 10up also created an audio pronunciation guide to help readers learn Hebrew words.

10up engineered and architected the new site to facilitate future iterations and improvements. By framing each feature as foundational, MJL and 10up can continuously build on the new design, preventing the site from suffering its predecessor’s stagnation.