My Work, Realized

I've been working on this project for more than a year. Among the hundreds of pieces of designed work I do and the conferences and everything else, one project for CFED has been on my plate since December of 2008. And that is the redesign of our website.

Finally, at 9:30 p.m. Friday, we launched the new site.

I cannot tell you how exciting it is to see this finally go live and now become a living site that we can work with. When I first came to CFED three years ago, during my interview I said that redesigning the website would be a project I could see worthy of my attention. This was because, in researching for the interview, I had no freaking clue what CFED did. I couldn't understand a damn thing that was published on their old site (the old front page is at right).

The navigation sucked. The pages were running wild with words that had no organization and little meaning to the untrained eye. When my coworker Kristin ran a test on the site, it was determined that the site was only worthy of those with an advanced degree or more. Or more?? Shit, most websites (at least those that want to attract people to them that are not porn or gambling) try to aim a tad lower than that in order to make sure people can understand what the hell it is you have on there. The site also lacked any visual aids whatsoever. Seriously, you see that front page? Those were about the only photos or graphics on the WHOLE DAMN site. It also had no bells and whistles. And I'm not talking about pop-up ads and other schmaltz. It just lacked feeling, emotion and connectivity. And those are things a nonprofit's website should be doing first. At least we had depth down. Ohh did we. Like abyss levels of depth.

Anyway, a team of four have been working on this ever since. There were ups and downs, and there were some months when I didn't know if my hard work was ever going to see the light of day. But in November the hammer got put down. We were going to bust our asses and get this new site launched by the end of the year. You would have thought we were putting man on the moon for the first time. Coworkers were freaking out and there were times when I wanted to break things regularly because, when you come from a newspaper mentality where deadlines are strict and often, it's sometimes a tough adaptation to a new sector where speed and timeliness give way to collaboration and hand-holding. I'm not judging, just sayin.

We missed our end-of-year deadline, but not by much. The four of us took a well-deserved break over the holidays and came back with renewed vigor. And in five days we had the thing ready to go. We were set to launch in the afternoon until I made a colossal screwup in moving our DNS to another company because our IT director and I read the web hosting company's site incorrectly. So we were delayed for about four hours while we solved that little hiccup. But we solved it as any good tech people do: with time spent on customer service calls, some htaccess redirects (yeah, you know what they are!) and a bottle of Jim Beam (not Kentucky's finest, but it was free, in-house and bourbon, so I was happy).

So now it's launched, and I hope you will take time to browse through it and check out all the great information and links we have in there. It's full of excellent background on all the work we do and you get a real understanding of how we are working to make real change, both in the policy world and on the ground, in the lives of low-income families across the country. It's certainly not a perfect 100% site. We'll probably find and fix a broken image or link, maybe even catch a misplaced comma or misspelled word. Happens all the time with brand-new websites, so I'm not expecting the world. I hope you'll take the time to check it out. It's been a part of my life for 13 months now, and it's wonderful to see it working and hearing people's reactions to it.