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A few weeks back, I saw a posting on the MomPack looking for a web designer who would barter design services. It’s been so long since I’ve taken on any web design clients and even longer since I’ve donated or did design work pro-bono. The first websites I ever designed were back in 1996 (yes that means I’m old). lol! My first design clients came in 2000. And some of those I took on as pro-bono sites to help me build a portfolio. One of those sites (which is no longer up and running) was done for an older woman who created handmade floral craft items. I took her site on for free so I could learn more about shopping carts. In the end, I had created a very large ordering site for her that brought her a nice chunk of regular orders and income to supplement her retirement. It was a website that she could never have afforded. It was a great feeling.
I’m not sure what spurred me to e-mail this particular lady back. I have no idea how I even caught the e-mail because I haven’t been actively reading the MomPack list in a long time. But I did. So I checked out her current site and saw that it had enough content in place that it would work as a wordpress site. Having just redid my blog, I thought it would be nice to delve a little more into wordpress. So I e-mailed the lady.
The non-profit is an Indiana organization run by Christine Martin. She started it last year in hopes of helping local single parent families and families who have experienced a loss of a child. It hit a little too close to home. Having just helped Jeanine get through a nasty divorce and seeing firsthand the changes single parenting has brought to her life, I thought karma seemed to be staring me in the face. I was going to help this lady if she’d let me.
So after a few e-mails back and forth with her, I started working on the website over the past few weekends. Unfortunately, I did not take a before shot of her old website. I usually do when I work a redesign but I completely forgot and the DNS switched. Bravenet – her old hosting – does not allow website viewing of accounts that aren’t pointing to them so there was no way to go back and view the old site using Bravenet’s server domain. I tried. So, I have no before shot unfortunately.
The before site was mainly white with text. It had a menu at the top that linked to all the individual text pages. It was designed using Bravenet’s website creator and was very basic.
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For the past week, I’ve been working on swapping my front room with my back room. I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile – over a year – but I kept running into resistance from other family members (..ahem… DH). But after some more arm twisting, we agreed to swap the rooms. Before the move, my front room – the room people walked into when they came in the front door – housed my computer, the Wii and Dan’s toys. It was usually a big mess. It was not an easy room to walk into every day nor was it a room conducive to having people sit down when they came over. Typically people would stand around at the front door and stare at my big mess. lol! I was just tired of it.
I took before photos – but I took them on my regular camera and for some reason my laptop isn’t reading my SD card this morning. The drive isn’t even coming up. The SD card is working because my camera recognizes it and usually my laptop recognizes it fine. Not going to be good if my SD reader is bad on my laptop. So I have no before photos to show you… only photos of my work in progress…the photos below were taken on my iPhone as I went along and are quite blurry. I have an older blog post (opens in new window) that has two photos of what my office and front door could get like although they weren’t this bad when I started my move…it’s always nice to have a point of reference. lol!
DAY 1 – Tuesday – The plan
The first thing I did was put together a planning sheet of where everything was going to go. I’m usually pretty good at visualizing things like this in my head… but I will still plan out diagrams on paper and work things out from there. I try to make my diagrams as close to scale as I can but they aren’t perfect.
This was my original new front room layout. It stayed exactly how I planned it out.
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