... please wait
Ever so often I am tasked with building, maintaining or upgrading websites for non-profits. These organizations are of course limited in their funding and so the task is often done in increments over several months. In this case the website http://alternativestodv.org/, a women's health organization and shelter located in Riverside California had a website that really needed some work. It is a Wordpress website that had fallen into disrepair. As with many Wordpress websites, the designer simply slapped in a template, changed the colors a bit added some photos and then installed every plugin under the sun. The website was severely running out of memory and took up to a minute to load (if it loaded at all). Not to mention the website was ugly and frankly for a website that was designed to help victims of violence. The website presented images that were...kinda violent. The overall message of the website based on the look and feel was misleading.
The theme folder was FULL or what had to be some 50 templates and there were some 20 or 30 plugins in the plugins folder (not all turned on, but many of them were, and few of them actually being used).
The homepage had an image slider that had a ton of very large images and animations that caused the site to take forever to load as well.
The Geographics team designed an elegant, soft look and feel to the website that felt more inviting and less like a 1980's rock video. Our copywriter consolidated the content into nearly half the pages and we laid out a flow that was a bit more easy to follow.
The website still needs a little work yet. We educated the stake holders on how they could improve their search engine position through regular updates, social media and incoming links. But, it will be slow going and we currently have other projects with larger budgets that need to be addressed.