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.