Website Re-Design Donated to Non-Profit Organization

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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