Expanding Access to Health Equity Resources with “The Skin You’re In”

Web Design

The Skin You’re In docufilm series, produced by Dean Thomas LaVeist of the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, investigates why Black Americans live sicker and die younger than any other ethnic group in the nation. As they prepared for the series to premiere at the Breakthrough Health Film Festival at Tulane in April 2025, the team wanted to rebuild their online presence and provide additional information to their audience alongside the research presented in the film. Unfortunately, they no longer had access to their original website and its library of educational resources.

A person browses the "The Skin You're In" website in a warm, well-lit living room.

Our Approach

Online Optimism built a replica of the old website from the ground up. We recreated the team’s original vision in a flexible, easy-to-use WordPress theme that would allow them to publish new pages and edit old ones whenever they needed. As always, we designed an accompanying website manual and provided video training on the new site, so the team was fully equipped to make any updates they had in mind.

The Skin You're In page builder and homepage example

Preservation and Enhancement

For each page on the old site, we retained the original content, rebuilt the layout, and improved functionality across the board with accessibility fixes, responsive adjustments, and branding adjustments to align with Tulane University’s 2024 standards. Even though some of the original pages were no longer relevant and would not be active on the new site, we still rebuilt and archived them on the back end of the website. This allowed us to preserve all the original content so the team could refer back to it as needed (or even update and republish it later on!), while keeping the front-end user experience clutter-free and up-to-date.

The Skin You're In Health Injustice page

Staying Connected

As part of the process, we also rebuilt the original contact, booking, and newsletter signup forms for the new site. Since the team still had an active mailing list for visitors who had signed up for updates or contacted them on the original site, we were able to connect the new forms to the old CRM for a seamless transition.

Results

We launched the new website to its original domain at tsyi.org far in advance of the 2025 premiere, allowing the social media team to begin referring visitors to the revitalized site as they promoted the film festival and provided new information to the community. In just the first week after launch alone, visits to the website more than doubled!

Watch the Trailer

From the Client

The Online Optimism team was fantastic to work with on our website rebuild. They were flexible with our timelines and quick to respond to feedback, and they gave us access to all our old content and resources again which was desperately needed. Overall we are thrilled with the final product and even more impressed by how seamless the team made the entire process, and we are excited to relaunch our site to bring awareness to health inequities in communities.