From Craft to Code

It is officially the last week of career development at The Iron Yard and our prototype, even stretched, is complete! Today Kelly and I review the presentation, practice it, and film tomorrow during rehearsals. October 25th is demo day and we are prepped, practiced, and ready to go! I am very proud of what we've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time! Over the next few weeks I will continue to work with the Center on implementing our prototype and then continuing to maintain it over time. The experience I've had working with them is invaluable and I am absolutely grateful at the opportunity to work with the community and build something that will help sustain and grow the LGBT Center of Raleigh. I am already looking forward to the lessons I will learn going forward. I anticipate a trial period that will require changes to our design. After hearing feedback from the community, volunteers, and members I anticipate a lot of excitement but certainly items tha...

A large part of the LGBT Center's website redesign is about the community as a whole. What purpose does the site serve? How does the community interact with the site? There are many questions we needed to answer in order to continue to change the design from what it is.  Here we analyzed some first reactions to the website layout as it is. We gathered from the placement of certain elements what might be important to a nonprofit to display above the fold. We visited other sites to examine those and test our hypothesis. After speaking with Jim, the current web guru who built the current site, our assumptions were confirmed. The LGBT Center's website does two things: takes care of current members of the location including staff and volunteers as well as expands to new audiences within the community who aren't familiar with the center yet. The page does this three ways. It displays upcoming events with a calendar, provides resources for those in need, and allows a quic...

On top of the LGBT Center's redesign I have now also been commissioned for a redesign of the Corky's Kettle Corn's website. They are a local kettle corn business that wants a larger online presence in order to expand and increase revenue. I will not only be in charge of client communication but design and development of their website using a few tools I haven't ever worked with before. The site itself is currently build on ZenCart and php - a software I've never used and a language I've never seen. However, I'm confident I can execute a satisfying template and implement it in a reasonable timeframe. I'm really excited to start learning more tools that will make me a more effective coder and freelancer! This is only a sketch of a splash page but it is a start! I hope it will inspire me over the next few weeks to continue to update and modernize Corky's website!