Must! Not! Succumb!
Dec. 8th, 2009 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI'm still looking for work and looking around at ways of enhancing my portfolio. Pickings have been slim this week, and there hasn't been a lot of action on the job boards, sadly. Last night, at a fundraiser for some political event I met the head of the board at the local botanical garden, who was grousing to the woman next to her that her "webmaster" was quitting on her, and he'd been hard to get to recently anyway. That made my ears prick up and I mentioned that I was looking for some work. "Oh, this is a volunteer position," she mentioned.
Well, that explains the lack of support. Still, anything's better than nothing, I suppose, and I mentioned that I'd be willing to look at it.
Big mistake. Let's start with the most fundamental problem, shall we? I haven't provided a link because, right now, the site is completely riddled with Javascript exploits. Nasty ones. I'm guessing that they're using some kind of CMS (an old install of Wordpress, I suspect) and have been hacked.
But underneath that, they've done an incredibly poor job of selling their site. The designer in me itches to fix it.
They have three major audiences: those who want to rent their services for meeting spaces, weddings, and other events; volunteers and foundation members who want to get their hands dirty one way or another; and the general public, to whom they are responsible for their various tax breaks. They do a terrible job of selling to any of these. The text on their "rent us" page is off-putting, full of warnings and prohibitions. You don't sell the site that way; you give them some gentle copy about "respecting our site" and "care for our delicate location," and then tell them the whole deal once they've downloaded the PDF with the contract.
And they're stingy with their photographs! Little things, barely 300px on a side, with lousy color balance and everything.
Already I'm thinking about "orange, no, yellow, no green--" How do we present the site as rentable on the home page, and what pictures do we need to make the garden look both beautiful and functional? How do we communicate the messages "This is your garden," "This garden can be rented for private purposes," and "This garden needs community volunteers to make it beautiful?" What SEO does it need? How do we put the site together, in such a way that it's easy to maintain? If it had to be turned over to the secretary, could he/she easily update the "News & Events" page and maintain the calendar?
The URLs are all hand-coded (no relative links, meaning SEO is slightly degraded, but definitively preclude edge service. Now, this is a small, rarely-visited website, but that's no reason to keep it dumb and, well, Web 1.0.
A nice background, maybe a leafy flare darkening into a comforting brown at least 960 wide, with a paper-texture cream-white for the revised copy, wider than it is tall, with three boxes underneath: "Our gardens," "Opportunities to Help," and "Events and Rentals Calendar," the last of which would be a widget with some nice rollovers or something.
But definitely, they need to fix that security issue.
Ahh! Turn it off, turn it off!
Well, that explains the lack of support. Still, anything's better than nothing, I suppose, and I mentioned that I'd be willing to look at it.
Big mistake. Let's start with the most fundamental problem, shall we? I haven't provided a link because, right now, the site is completely riddled with Javascript exploits. Nasty ones. I'm guessing that they're using some kind of CMS (an old install of Wordpress, I suspect) and have been hacked.
But underneath that, they've done an incredibly poor job of selling their site. The designer in me itches to fix it.
They have three major audiences: those who want to rent their services for meeting spaces, weddings, and other events; volunteers and foundation members who want to get their hands dirty one way or another; and the general public, to whom they are responsible for their various tax breaks. They do a terrible job of selling to any of these. The text on their "rent us" page is off-putting, full of warnings and prohibitions. You don't sell the site that way; you give them some gentle copy about "respecting our site" and "care for our delicate location," and then tell them the whole deal once they've downloaded the PDF with the contract.
And they're stingy with their photographs! Little things, barely 300px on a side, with lousy color balance and everything.
Already I'm thinking about "orange, no, yellow, no green--" How do we present the site as rentable on the home page, and what pictures do we need to make the garden look both beautiful and functional? How do we communicate the messages "This is your garden," "This garden can be rented for private purposes," and "This garden needs community volunteers to make it beautiful?" What SEO does it need? How do we put the site together, in such a way that it's easy to maintain? If it had to be turned over to the secretary, could he/she easily update the "News & Events" page and maintain the calendar?
The URLs are all hand-coded (no relative links, meaning SEO is slightly degraded, but definitively preclude edge service. Now, this is a small, rarely-visited website, but that's no reason to keep it dumb and, well, Web 1.0.
A nice background, maybe a leafy flare darkening into a comforting brown at least 960 wide, with a paper-texture cream-white for the revised copy, wider than it is tall, with three boxes underneath: "Our gardens," "Opportunities to Help," and "Events and Rentals Calendar," the last of which would be a widget with some nice rollovers or something.
But definitely, they need to fix that security issue.
Ahh! Turn it off, turn it off!
