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.
Here is the redesign.
I had a lot of fun working the design. Along the way, I learned a lot more about word press especially creating different sidebars for different areas of a site. The new design was coded from a blank frameset like this blog was. But… there were several things I did better this time around. That being said, I did not do all the end testing in various browsers so I have no idea if the site looks right in anything but the current versions of firefox or IE. If you happen to see something that seems out of whack, let me know so I can fix it for her.
Ultimately, I’m very happy with the outcome and think Christine is too. I sincerely hope the new design gives her non-profit organization a fighting chance to help women in need in her local area.
Non-Profit Website: BlessingInGiving.org
Owner: Christine Martin
EDIT: I just saw this post – How to create your best website layouts ever so I thought I’d throw up my sketches of this site. Just a little peek into Jen’s brain… lolol!
