tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-358069612024-09-06T15:01:51.469-07:00A public diary of a non-profit's website redesign processChas Offutthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02974686835681672394noreply@blogger.comBlogger128125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-57970813592968381182007-04-16T17:37:00.001-07:002008-12-08T19:46:47.551-08:00

It's been one year since I applied to American Rivers, 10 months of website redesign internal chatter and more than six months of blogging about our redesign(s) and I'm happy to report that we've reached the end of the road...maybe the end of this road (like a launch is ever an end).I had all of these great ideas about how I could show the good, bad and not so good times along the way, but I'm

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-63904134279980533342007-04-12T05:17:00.000-07:002007-04-12T04:41:28.925-07:00

Though the national redesign is on it's fourth day of delay (not bad!), the wiki glossary and blog are now live. Over 60 posts fill the community blog, dating back to 2006, and more than a handful of terms exist in the first wiki glossary dedicated to river conservation - very cool.For me, the blog wrangling continues - hence my light blog posts over the last couple of weeks - and wrapping up

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-67170003765114313612007-04-11T18:23:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:47.828-08:00

After 8+ months of conceptualizing the whats, whys, whos, and hows, we've finally launched Act for Healthy Rivers (www.healthyrivers.org). The first site, phase I, is designed to speak to river groups, or anyone working (and possibly profiting, ie rafting or guiding services) on the water.Phase II, which is scheduled to launch early this summer, is geared to *Joe Public*. Not too many details on

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-87816762635270325382007-04-04T14:22:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:48.207-08:00

Creativity is good, but finding those who are doing well is better.That's at least been my mantra as we've gone through the redesign process. I love finding good examples of what others are doing online and using it as a benchmark for us and our work on the web.And fortunately, there are some great brains in the non-profit tech/strategy world who have really opened my eyes as we near the end of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-51332547107618599082007-04-04T05:11:00.000-07:002007-04-04T14:19:18.164-07:00

delayed launch.It's Wednesday morning and we have a national site that is looking great, but is taking a little longer to develop than expected.Since last fall, we've been shooting for an April 6th launch date to give us a couple of weeks to work out the kinks prior to the biggest media event of the year (i.e. traffic to the site), the release of America's Most Endangered Rivers of 2007 report on

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-72968210943810144322007-04-02T15:21:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:48.657-08:00

We're still planning on launching Friday - as of now. The pages are being built, content being migrated, and staff being informed of the various (and exciting) upgrades to the new site. And funny thing, after five or six straight weekends of work, I suddenly feel like there isn't much to do. Calm before the storm?Our partners have all of the content, the blog and the wiki are gearing up for the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-21279237918543882922007-03-30T11:29:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:49.788-08:00

One week until launch and we have over 400+ pages to convert (create for most) to the new look. Safe to say, the next week will be busy.In the mean time, I sent a second email to all staff with the following screenshots. My first email contained only the front page a week ago, so it was about time to give everyone a better idea (as I see it develop for myself) of our new look and direction. Since

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-82871389900436964982007-03-27T14:26:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:50.523-08:00

We're soooo close to wrapping up this site and launching Act for Healthy Rivers, a project that has been in the making since last July. This has not been an easy task - small niche campaigns never are - but overall I think we're in a good place.Plus, the *slog* will be reinforced/cross-promoted nicely on our national river blog. More to come, but here are a few screenshots.Front pageSlog (sewage

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-60315348381979112622007-03-23T05:43:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:50.885-08:00

Over the last couple of days, I've gone back and forth with our partner on the design of the blog and I'm quite happy with the finished product. Blogs are so easy. In fact, so easy (and fun) that I've been distracted from what I probably should be doing more of...content wrangling.But fortunately, I am roughly 70% complete with two content sections left to go, *Your Region* and *Community Tools*

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-14210088980186145482007-03-21T21:01:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:50.900-08:00

Well, you get the idea, it's a blog, with blog stuff, that does blog things. But we plan on sprucing it up a wee bit so that it looks a little less of a packaged WordPress theme.I really like the header, and though I spent too much time searching for photos last night, I think we'll probably use it just the way it is. Searching for photos is such a time suck, but oddly enough, somewhat

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-42609097779299259432007-03-21T16:01:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:51.043-08:00

Trust me, the sum of the parts will make a whole site, but for now the immediate focus is on the individual components. And we need a lot of them as we build out the various parts in Convio - but that's actually kind of preferred as I'm learning.The more parts we have, the greater control of the site we'll have down the road. For those who know Convio, we'll have a lot of *reusable* content at

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-26556291710353824142007-03-20T18:43:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:51.216-08:00

I'm pretty psyched about this: our very own RIVERpedia that can complement Wikipedia's existing river entries as well as create new ones. It's kind of lofty, but our goal is to expand the knowledge-base of river terms. I've been talking about wikis quite a bit (internally and externally), so it's good to finally see a public facing wiki.Though we're using two wikispaces.com wikis internally (for

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-84735063799719066962007-03-16T07:08:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:51.472-08:00

As I'm learning, few things are built inside of Convio. Currently, our team is building a variety of pages that will eventually be broken down into components and migrated to Convio. The sum of the parts: a page wrapper that can be edited by us.Then when ready, it appears that with our new wrapper and security category, we can easily switch out one page wrapper with the other - content remaining

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-86028711692507973272007-03-15T07:26:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:51.757-08:00

We had a quick look at a mock-up of the newsletter last week, but I think it was a little premature as the design concept matched past iterations of our homepage design.This one is much more along the lines of what our website will look like, minus the logo of course. So, on the right track.Our edits/thoughts with the design elements were basically -Header: Seemed like there were two headers on

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-3348068369119400162007-03-13T21:53:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:52.112-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that we had exceeded last year's number by 50. Well, as of today we've doubled last year's total (300 cleanup organizers!). And it continues to grow, which is very cool.On top of it, looks like we'll have four 2008 Subarus (possibly before they even hit the showroom floor) to drive around various parts of the country promoting National River Cleanup Week.What

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-14137116155386350932007-03-13T14:41:00.000-07:002008-12-08T19:46:52.298-08:00

This comic strip is fitting for yesterday's post...Funny, we finalized our blogging policy Monday morning and that afternoon, a colleague gave me the below Frank and Ernest comic strip. This makes at least three web-related strips that have been left on my desk, and yes, sometimes even mysteriously.But kind of cool, like the 5th grade anonymous valentine card (that is until you discover it was

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-85494513796731247622007-03-12T15:35:00.000-07:002007-03-12T19:50:17.125-07:00

For the last few weeks, our controlled group of 10 bloggers have been meeting and discussing what it means to blog. Yes, as I've been musing all along, we're attempting to define it for us.These meetings have been a lot of fun, and productive, which is cooler. We've taken a look at who's blogging, how they're talking online, and what value we can add to the river conversation (we know it's

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-82734389110891644472007-03-01T20:27:00.000-08:002007-03-01T20:44:45.934-08:00

For the last five months I've been able to squeeze in (okay, on average that is) at least one post a day to follow our three website redesign web developments, but this week I've completely fallen of course. And it's not slowing down.As we enter the production phase, the content needs have finally taken its toll on me. I can finally say - with great confidence - that we're no longer redesigning a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-47687927532785628972007-02-26T11:07:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:52.649-08:00

We knew developing a strategy for Act for Healthy Rivers would be a challenge. We knew conceptualizing the bits and pieces would be time consuming, if not frustrating. And we knew that at some point, all of us would have different ideas of what it should look like. Basically, we were right on all levels.But I think that's a fairly typical design process too. Sometimes things have to get worse

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-20651765693826941832007-02-26T05:28:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:53.499-08:00

OneMinuteHowTo.com is a lot of fun. Each podcast is unique, creative, and engaging. A perfect opportunity to expand - if not further test - our outreach opportunities online, right?But before I attempted to sell it internally, I felt I needed to go through the process myself. So, I recorded a show with George (for the music buffs, a must visit: EclecticMix) on creating a 2.0 organization. I've

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-87769708219804055812007-02-24T08:38:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:54.249-08:00

We have about 6-weeks left until the National River Cleanup Week registration deadline arrives and we've already exceeded last year's number of organizers by 50 - very cool! We've had a couple of hiccups early on with the Google-map-in-reverse strategy, but it seems to be working just fine now - I think it was (usually is) an issue with our language, not clear enough.We've come a long way since

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-86398955110405419692007-02-23T18:55:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:54.702-08:00

Let the coding begin! Today, our partners handed off the creative assets to our second half partners so that the back end work can begin Monday morning. We've come a long way since the early rounds of the wireframes.I didn't plan for Convio's consultants to be involved in the process, but after a call between one of their tech guys and our team on the ground, I realized that it would be a big

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-34750674182618369302007-02-21T17:57:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:56.062-08:00

We've taken left and right turns over the last couple of weeks, but with every turn we've seemed to bounce back and land in the middle. I was a bit frustrated with the last design, but it was my suggestions that pointed us in that direction. It's funny, though I know the colors, design structure, and direction of the site, once you see your ideas actually in place, it's easy to think, 'what was I

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-9991241124122988502007-02-20T19:22:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:56.188-08:00

The latest design for Act for Healthy Rivers took a downward turn. After the intervention last Thursday, we thought we were on the right track. But unfortunately not.Basically, it was too much map, not enough of sewage + blog = slog. We want river groups to enlist, but the engine of the site will be the slog content which we will use to drive more folks to the site.Though the newest design

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35806961.post-48722542487248224192007-02-19T15:04:00.000-08:002008-12-08T19:46:56.353-08:00

The biggest problem with the first design was 1) the amount of space the top image took and 2) the fact that the email sign-up box was at the bottom of the page.Given that most of our content was below the fold with the first design, our request was to change things around and bring the content to the surface - as much as possible. However, despite our best effort, the second draft didn't seem to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0