Major(Retired) Harold A. Skaarup, aka SilverHawkAuthor, is a military writer and blogger. The SilverHawkAuthor website showcases Harold’s books and articles concerning the history of the Canadian Army, and events involving Canadians overseas, some of which he took part in during his military career. Through a rich selection of articles and blog posts, Harold shares his research on aviation, armor, and weapons of war preserved in Canada and other parts of the world.
The website contains over 1000 articles and blog posts. One of my primary tasks was to create a content architecture which allowed Hal to easily add new articles, and which helped the website’s visitors to quickly and intuitively find the most relevant content.
Harold is a highly talented author. Not only does he write comprehensive blog posts, but he has more than 50 published books to his name. On the old version of the website, purchasing a book was a challenging task for users. My goal, therefore, was to make the customer journey as straightforward and productive as possible.
The original website was built before the rise of smartphones. When accessing the site on a smartphone, visitors would previously encounter a zoomed-out version of the desktop with text that was difficult to read. As almost 40% of Harold’s website visitors now browse from their smartphones, making the website friendly for small devices was one of our main priorities.
As this is a personal blog, we wanted it to reflect as much as possible of Harold’s personality. Retired Army Intelligence Officer, meticulous researcher, highly organized and extremely curious person, loving father and grandfather… We wanted visitors to feel it all as they browsed through the website’s pages.
My client is extremely happy with how easy it is now to add new articles and maintain existing ones. The changes we made have also supported book sales as well. The website now receives an average of 500 active users per day, reaching a wider community of history lovers and researchers all over the world.
"...We did not know where to start, and Karina immediately put us at ease with her expertise. She explained things in a way that was simple to understand while moving to a new platform, and she provided options and updates as the process moved along. She was flexible and communicated frequently. The site is functional, aesthetically pleasing, organized, intuitive, and easy to navigate. A big factor throughout the process wasn't just having a "nuts and bolts" approach - we needed someone who would make significant efforts to truly understand the business / field of work (military history) that we were working with. Again, she was amazing with this and really went above and beyond to make sure the content flowed well on the website while understanding the target audience..."
Harold's son, Sean Skaarup
