The New Berkeley Herbal Center Website

Welcome to our new website!

A few months ago, we changed our name from Ohlone to Berkeley Herbal Center, and with it came a new URL, new branding, logo, and outward design updates of our website.

With that launch, we also wanted to emerge into 2020 with updated payment methods, clearer navigation options, purchasable online courses, and a more mobile friendly design. But the site still operated on the same bones, plugins, and outdated code that it had for the past several years (Read: since before cell phones were widely used to casually surf the web).

This made a lot of our intended updates difficult or impossible to do. So we made a radical decision: a complete functional recreation of the website.

We started this process in April, and it took a couple of months, but we have officially transitioned to the new website! The URL is still berkeleyherbalcenter.org and you’ll still find everything here that you have before, but we wanted to share the most exciting updates with you in this article.

Our Online Courses Library

The most important and exciting part of the website recreation is that we now have the ability to record and offer our classes for sale online.

You can purchase these right from our website and we will send you the classes instantly! That means we can offer accurate traditional herbal information to people around the globe at an affordable cost.

We are also putting into place a structure that allows us to pay “royalties” to the practitioners that share their knowledge in these courses. So if you decide to buy one of our online courses, know that the practitioners that put on the course are getting paid for their work.

The Functional Updates

Aside from being able to host our online classes, we have several other improvements to the website functionality. 

Ease of Payment

The first is the ease of paying for classes. We want our current and prospective students to have an easy experience in accessing the herbal education they desire.

Before now, the buying process for a class was confusing for our students, and we had to do a lot of data diving on the back end to ensure that all of our student rosters were accurate for you.

Coming into the new age of technology allows you to pay for your classes and certification courses like you would through a regular online checkout process – and we have automatic, accessible class rosters at our fingertips so we don’t miss you in class! 

Clarity in Communication

We knew going into this project that one of our main goals was the ability to expand to offer live online classes, long term online courses, and to create an online course library for our students. We also want to expand our audience so that we can educate more people about how to heal their communities using our plant allies.

That meant we needed to work on how we were communicating about the different educational options! 

The biggest changes in clarity are in the Courses page and the Herbal Certifications pages. Ensuring these different ways of learning were clear and distinct were our top priorities because we primarily operate as a non-profit herbal school.

The new certifications pages in particular have a lot more information about what our long term program actually entails and what that commitment looks like for a prospective student.  We have also made it easier to apply to our program and added an easy application fee step to allow us to make sure that our student services are able to properly look through every applicant’s credentials for our school. 

Mobile Responsive

The old site was built before mobile responsiveness was important for a website. When we learned how many people visited our website on mobile and that the mobile experience wasn’t great, this became important for us.

We’re urban herbalists, so we get it – everyone is tied to their phones these days. We want people to be able to read the herb blog on the bus, or find their next herb class on the go.

So we’re proud to say that the new website is optimized for mobile! Hello new age of herbalism!

Easier to Navigate

And here’s the cherry on top: the navigation menu of the website is updated too. The categories are clear and it’s easy to find exactly what information you’re looking for!

A Note From the Creators

Our site was recreated by the ladies over at Dandelion Branding. One of the founders is an alumni of our school (herbalists come in many forms!) so we thought, who better than an alumni to help with our name change? But we invited them to stay on board to help solidify the voice and  vision the school and our clinic. The Dandelion team is responsible for all of our website updates, our social media posts, our blog articles, emails, and ensuring that our online processing and timing runs smoothly.

Here’s what they had to say about updating the new BHC Website:

“When building this site we wanted to make sure that the feeling stayed the same! BHC has been running well for more than 25 years and we are familiar with the school, so the cool, herbal vibe was easy to keep intact.

We really wanted to focus this update on solving pain points for the school. What we saw was the need to make it easier for the practitioners to offer their classes, administrators to have easier access to class sign up information, and to make sure signing up for classes was as simple as possible.

This project, and working with the BHC team, has been a dream! We’re honored to play a part in the growth of a school so actively focused on educating new generations of people to help shepherd our planet towards regeneration and safe healing. Thanks BHC!” – Court and Aub. 

Go click around and let us know what you think in the comments!