Tunnel 7 Launches New Springfield School Volunteers Website
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March 29, 2013 filed under: News, Website Design
When people ask me who I work for I typically respond that I love doing great work for even better organizations. This is definitely true of the Springfield School Volunteers. They work with area schools to setup tutoring, mentoring and read aloud programs for students and generally do outstanding work in the Springfield school system.
Old pain points and new goals
Their old website was, well, old. Technology changes fast and they hadn't kept up well and they found maintaining the old website cumbersome so content became stale and out of date over time.
For this project I met with them and identified their goals and built the design around them. They wanted to clearly express what programs they offered and encourage more volunteers and charitable donations. To this end I simplified their navigation and page layouts to spotlight these areas in a prominent way.
Focusing on content and easy maintenance
We then worked together to define the different content they had (and needed) to support these goals. A website design is only as good as the content that it is built around so together we decided on unique content types for volunteer opportunities, volunteer spotlights, standard pages, slideshows and news.
Of course a new website is all but useless if the client can't easily maintain the website. To make sure this new website would be easy to keep updated and current I deployed my custom configuration of ExpressionEngine (a content management system I often use). With this new system the client can now:
- Easily add / edit pages
- Easily reorder page order
- Easily add / edit slides (and captions) for the slideshow
- Easily publish news, volunteer opportunites and volunteer spotlights
- Easily edit online forms
Forward thinking technology
One thing I like to do with any project (especially in the rapidly changing world of website technology) is to make sure the new site is up to date from a technology standpoint ... and looking forward. This new website is built on HTML5 and CSS3 and uses features of both these technologies.
Right now the website has a very limited number of mobile visitors so we decided not to put resources into mobile just yet, but instead I programmed the site so that the framework for a responsive, mobile friendly design is in place and can be deployed without having to rebuild the entire site down the road.
The website also utilizes Google Analytics and we have a number of goals setup to track performance of the new website going forward. Using this data we will be able to make revisions based on objective data and better focus on goals and return on investment.
Collaboration = better results
Finally a word about collaboration. Working with the Springfield School Volunteers on this project was great. They were responsive and timely and together we worked through some thorny content issues that arose during the project. I love working with clients like this that are invested in the project.
Collaboration truly does bring better results and I am proud to have been able to work with the Springfield School Volunteers on this redesign project and look forward to continuing to collaborate and support their website efforts going forward!