VitriFire

Of course, you have a good idea of who you serve, and which other organizations do similar things. But your head isn’t always in the stratosphere…most of the time you are concerned with the day-to-day operations, or getting out the next grant application, or preparing for the next event. Perhaps, then, your organization might benefit from an outsider’s perspective. Hope Norman (Principal) has an MBA from Yale School of Management, which has a long tradition of preparing students to lead and advise nonprofit and governmental organizations. She has spent most of her career working with nonprofits and public education entities. Electing for a Position and Constituent Review by Hope will help us to together craft a website that will best meet the needs of all your constituents: your clients, donors (both foundation and individual), staff, volunteers, peers, and community.

It is very possible to have a beautiful website or a technologically sophisticated website that is nearly useless to your constituents (clients, donors, volunteers, etc). In order to communicate your message through the web, your site must have simple, clean organization, and the configuration of each page must conform to usability best practices.

During the Structure & Usability phase, we’ll start by ignoring your current website and literature, and take a fresh look at what your contents should include to best meet the needs of your constituents. We’ll then compare our conclusions with your available resources (including your current website), and between the two we’ll develop a very complete list of information. We’ll work together to organize this list into a site map (outline) that will most clearly allow your website users to navigate to the information they desire to see, and will give you the maximum opportunity to direct these users to the information you desire them to see.

For complex explanations and processes, we may wish to create page wireframes. Wireframes allow us to mock up the most user-friendly and elegant layout for a page without the encumbrance of imagery, color or other design elements. Wireframes also allow us to craft straightforward interactions between pages, tasks, and concepts.

At the end of this phase, we will have identified any new content that should be created by your staff. This content should be written during the design and template building phases, to be ready for placement during Content Conversion. As you write your content, we will be happy to review it to ensure its appropriateness for the web.

For most people, the design phase is the most exciting part of the website creation process.

Many organizations will have a logo and/or an existing design scheme that can be extended to the website. For these organizations, a new website design can be quickly completed, and there should be little need for joint brainstorming or additional design choices.

If, however, your organization lacks either a logo or an existing design scheme, we should go through a design “discovery” process in which VitriFire works with you to determine the aesthetic direction for the new website. We’ll ask you some probing questions paired with visual examples, concentrating on the tastes of your key users. Using your feedback, VitriFire will prepare a mock-up of the homepage and at least one sub-page. We’ll then confer, and the design will be modified based on your feedback.

In some cases, you may wish to begin the design process with creation of a logo. Your logo can be the cornerstone of your web site design, and should be consistent across all of your marketing. Creation of a logo is a process separate from creation of a webpage design.

In other cases, you may wish to see more than one design choice. For example, if you would like to create new literature and branded materials around your new website, or if your aesthetic choices are very important to the success of your organization, you may elect to see multiple mock-ups.

Once we have finalized the design, VitriFire will begin building templates (using html and/or php and css). For small websites, we will generally only create two templates – one for the homepage, and one for all sub-pages. However, for organizations requiring some distinct variations in sub-pages, more than one sub-page template would be created.

Templates can be utilized through an application on your desktop (Macromedia Contribute, which is extremely user friendly and fairly inexpensive), or over the internet (in Wordpress or Joomla!, which are both free but are a bit more difficult to use and implement).

Once the templates are in place, we can begin populating your website with information. Your staff can do this (with some support from VitriFire, if necessary), or VitriFire staff can do this for a reasonable fee-per-page. When filling in your site, you will probably need to edit some photos prior to placing them; Adobe Photoshop Elements ($139) is a good choice for accomplishing this.

• Interactive Maps: Using Google Maps, we can create a map with multiple facilities of interest that will allow your website visitors to get directions from anywhere.
• Blogs: This is one of the easiest ways to have fresh information. Blog entries are catalogued according to date and categories that you define, and website users can subscribe to your blog via rss. This is a fantastic way to maintain regular contact with your constituents.
• Calendar: If you have a complex calendar (such as for a school system), you may wish to include an interactive calendar on your website. VitriFire has had good results using ConnectDaily’s hosted calendar.
• Simple Flash Slideshow: Simple flash slideshows can be used to raise the level of sophistication on a homepage, or to present a series of photos about an event or a place. These slideshows require an inexpensive ($29) plug-in, XML Flash Slideshow (see Examples).

Content conversion is the process by which your text is transferred to your new website. As compared to the rest of the web design process, the work of content conversion is very simple. Most of the time, website owners can just copy and paste new content into web pages using Adobe Contribute, Joomla or Wordpress, all of which are fairly easy to use. However, there are pitfalls…your staff doing the content conversion should understand the use of hierarchical headings, seemly use of font variations, image selection and editing and placement, and use of text features.

VitriFire can complete your content conversion for a reasonable rate per page. You provide the images, movies, etc. via email or CD our content management professionals place this new information (editing photos as necessary); the information is reviewed by senior VitriFire staff; and finally, you are sent an email notifying you that your information is live and ready for your review. When you say the word, your site is made available to the public.

If you have not already identified a domain name (e.g. www.yourorganizationname.org) or hosting company (the place where your website is physically maintained), VitriFire can set this up for you. We typically work with GoDaddy.com, but will be happy to work with anyone you identify (including your brother’s cousin’s best friend with a web server).