The Georgia Department of Agriculture (GDA) plays a vital role in sustaining the state's thriving agribusiness, overseeing everything from food safety to farmers markets while promoting Georgia’s agricultural heritage. To better serve their diverse audience—including farmers, businesses, and consumers—GDA needed a modern, user-friendly website that made accessing essential information faster and easier.
Project Highlights
- A relaunched user-friendly website celebrates Georgia's agricultural heritage, enhancing accessibility and engagement.
- Overhauled navigation was aligned with user needs, utilizes a component-based design system that simplifies content discovery and improves readability.
- GDA's licensing processes were streamlined by replacing outdated manual systems with efficient, fully online applications, significantly reducing administrative burdens and improving user convenience.
Mediacurrent partnered with GDA to completely reimagine their digital presence, delivering a website that combines enhanced functionality with a welcoming and professional aesthetic. Through an in-depth research and design phase, we refreshed their visual identity, streamlined their content and navigation, and migrated their outdated custom CMS to an open-source platform. This shift not only made the site easier to manage but also more accessible and intuitive for users.
The redesigned site sets a new standard for government websites, offering a more engaging and approachable interface that elevates GDA’s online brand. The overhaul transformed critical functions, such as simplifying GDA’s licensing processes, and introduced a component-based design system to replace outdated, long-scrolling pages. The result is a website that is faster, smarter, and better equipped to meet the needs of Georgia’s agricultural community.
Creating a Welcoming Government Brand
Government websites often have a reputation for being dry or challenging to navigate, but GDA’s needed to break that mold. Our goal was to craft a welcoming, engaging online experience that captures the vital role GDA plays in Georgia’s agribusiness.
Collaborating closely with their marketing team, we introduced a fresh, modern design that blends functionality with a sense of pride in Georgia’s agricultural heritage. Bright, vibrant imagery puts the spotlight on the people, landscapes, and products that make the state’s agriculture industry thrive. Paired with clean, accessible typography and intuitive navigation, the new site invites users in while making it easier than ever to find the information they need. The result is an online presence that’s as dynamic and essential as the community it serves.
Making Government Easier to Navigate
The old GDA website was structured around the agency’s internal divisions—a format that made sense internally but didn’t align with how users sought information. Through user research, we discovered that farmers, businesses, and consumers approached the site with specific tasks and questions in mind, not by navigating departmental silos.
To address this, we completely overhauled the navigation and information architecture, focusing on user needs and using clear, straightforward language to guide their journeys. A new component-based design system broke content into digestible sections, replacing the overwhelming long-scrolling pages of the past.
Partnering with Rhythm, we also enhanced the site’s content quality by simplifying complex technical jargon and centralizing key resources. Together, these changes made the site easier to use, more intuitive, and better suited to help visitors find the information they need quickly and efficiently.
Digitizing Manual Processes
One of GDA’s most significant challenges was its cumbersome, outdated licensing process. With hundreds of forms scattered across the old site, users were required to download PDFs, print them, and then mail or deliver them in person—a time-consuming hassle for busy farmers, businesses, and other applicants.
We completely reimagined this process by converting those static PDFs into dynamic web forms, allowing users to complete and submit applications entirely online. Now, licenses can be applied for from anywhere—even from the seat of a tractor. This digital transformation has streamlined the process, saving time for applicants and significantly reducing the administrative burden on GDA staff. Since the new site’s launch, this shift to online licensing has been widely adopted across GDA’s divisions, improving efficiency and accessibility for all.
