Time is flying, as always, as we hurtle headlong towards Launch Day. This week, the team - Kenny, Gavin, Kristen, Kevin and Matteo - met with Ben and Amelia at Digital Loom to discuss the NPO Connect homepage redesign. Ben has worked with Kenny before, on Kenny's K. Weill Consulting Group site - interestingly, while they've known each other for years, this was their first time meeting face-to-face. It's marvelous, the capacity we all have for remote collaboration.
At Digital Loom's Cambridge office building, a long maze of nondescript white-walled corridors led to a wonderfully warm and inviting space where we were kindly offered coffee by co-director Victoria, then all gathered in a tiny room with the biggest Mac monitor I've ever seen. It was glorious - I kind of wanted to hug it. But I digress.
This is a critical point, design-wise, for the homepage. We have a lot of ideas we need to get across for the new site: we're for nonprofit organizations, professionals, and volunteers; we have a free service, but also great paid services; we're an easy way for cash-strapped nonprofits to offer some professional development to their staff and volunteers, or for individuals to advance their own development; we offer a bunch of opportunities for seasoned professionals to mentor and network with nonprofit newbies. We all dislike cluttered-looking websites, and thankfully Ben is on the same page (no pun intended), so there will be some careful consideration given to the layout. We've all joined Basecamp so that we can stay in touch and firm up our choices. Of course, you'll be the first to see our choices right here on the blog.
On the development front, Kevin, Gavin and Matteo have been madly at work migrating the current site to Drupal 7, hammering out the new features, and designing the new site workflow. There are a lot of features and processes that need to be automated, and we're really excited about testing next month. I'll be frank: as a communications person, I don't understand half of what they do. They could be doing some Harry Potter stuff over there for all I know. But I'll do my best to explain things, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments.
(I tried to suggest - to IT people who are completely in the weeds - that they do some blogging themselves. You could say I'm an optimistic person, ha ha. Amazingly, I still have both my arms!)
At Digital Loom's Cambridge office building, a long maze of nondescript white-walled corridors led to a wonderfully warm and inviting space where we were kindly offered coffee by co-director Victoria, then all gathered in a tiny room with the biggest Mac monitor I've ever seen. It was glorious - I kind of wanted to hug it. But I digress.
This is a critical point, design-wise, for the homepage. We have a lot of ideas we need to get across for the new site: we're for nonprofit organizations, professionals, and volunteers; we have a free service, but also great paid services; we're an easy way for cash-strapped nonprofits to offer some professional development to their staff and volunteers, or for individuals to advance their own development; we offer a bunch of opportunities for seasoned professionals to mentor and network with nonprofit newbies. We all dislike cluttered-looking websites, and thankfully Ben is on the same page (no pun intended), so there will be some careful consideration given to the layout. We've all joined Basecamp so that we can stay in touch and firm up our choices. Of course, you'll be the first to see our choices right here on the blog.
On the development front, Kevin, Gavin and Matteo have been madly at work migrating the current site to Drupal 7, hammering out the new features, and designing the new site workflow. There are a lot of features and processes that need to be automated, and we're really excited about testing next month. I'll be frank: as a communications person, I don't understand half of what they do. They could be doing some Harry Potter stuff over there for all I know. But I'll do my best to explain things, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments.
(I tried to suggest - to IT people who are completely in the weeds - that they do some blogging themselves. You could say I'm an optimistic person, ha ha. Amazingly, I still have both my arms!)
- Kristen
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