There are some times that you get to work with organisations that are doing great things. Working on the re-design & development of the website for Alan Kerins Projects was one of those times.
When I first started the project I spent time looking at the videos & photos collected by their volunteers on the ground, learning about their organisation and their projects. The work they do is inspiring and well worthy of support.
The idea behind the re-design was to give more of a focus to the projects that they run. While their previous site covered parts of these, it was more in the form of news, rather than giving them the weight they deserved to help people see the great on-going work.
As a very people-driven organisation, we also wanted to integrate the social media side of things in a much better way. To do this, the homepage pulls together fresh content from the different channels used by the the organisation, such as their YouTube Channel, Flickr photos and new Facebook page (a move away from the earlier Facebook Group), as well as presenting all the updates that go on throughout the site’s news & events section.
We also wanted to make it much easier for people to contribute to the organisation’s projects, either by donating directly to the charity (which is powered by MyCharity.ie), or by helping in other ways. Again, the benefits of social media are used on each of the individual project’s pages to help people share what they’ve seen to raise awareness of the work.
On the technology
The site is built on WordPress. To bring the vision they had to reality, we used several of the updates that came in WordPress 3.0; for example, there is extensive usage of WordPress’s Custom Post Types, and parts of the site are built using the recently integrated multi-site feature.
Give a Little
The organisation is supported by voluntary donations, so, after you’ve had a chance to look through the site, making a donation no matter how small would be a great way to help them keep their good work going.
