New Website Up
I started working with Hope To Action to redesign their blog called Women of Influence, and ended up helming a full site redesign from start to finish in about six weeks. Hope To Action’s new website serves as a full-service online community site supporting women’s grassroots efforts for climate protection. Check out the new site!
While I’ve dabbled in design projects from time to time, I’ve never been the dedicated website designer and coder. I was alternately frustrated and exhilerated and learned a whole new bag of tricks. A few lessons learned:
I love WordPress. It’s flexible, powerful, and not that hard to learn. And open source, which makes it a great community tool with lots of free plug-ins. In the near-term, my next website platforms to start exploring are WordPress MU and BuddyPress — which together, make for a powerful set of social community tools.
Deepen the engagement. Organization objectives can sometimes confuse website priorities. One good overall principle is to focus on how to engage your audience through new content and opportunities to participate. Fresh content is the key to driving traffic, so organize the rest of your information and features around that centerpiece. And adding participatory community tools gives your readers a chance to become engaged with your mission in a deeper way. So whether it’s offering commenting, tracking tools, or games for diversion, inspire your readers to keep coming back for more.
School is tough. I probably should not have taken on a project with such a steep learning curve and condensed timeframe while being a full-time grad student. My clients were wonderfully accomodating of my schedule, but I sadly had to pull out a week before launch, transferring the site to a professional team who pulled it through that final week.
Click on the pictures to compare the old and new site designs.
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Posted on March 12th, 2009 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Media, Participatory Culture, Uncategorized
Looks great! Very clean and *fresh*. Planning to do more web design work, hm?
Hey Marcia! Enjoying the web design work, but no more massive projects til the semester is OVER. How’s the SF program you’re in? Are you finishing now?
SF program is going well. Just have 2 more classes – market research and that final class that puts everything together. Will be done by June, woohoo! Btw, check out the new ie website – I finally got that up!
That’s great to hear, June is not that far away! And thanks for sending me the link, the new site looks fabulous! I love love the homepage, the colors are gorgeous. I always liked the old site but this one freshens up the design and copy perfectly. Did you work with NKD for the graphic design/Flash?
Thanks! Nkd did the design/flash then patricia/netgirl did the programming. It wasn’t an easy arrangement -that’s for sure. Got to figure out a better model. Or rather, gotta find someone who can design AND program.