Amizade, Global Service-Learning, Redesign 2014

September 29, 2014 2:28pm

Amizade is a non-profit organization who’s mission is to help groups and individuals interested in gaining experience and education through traveling to other places in the world and volunteering. The promise of travel, volunteering, and widening perspectives all make their organization successful, and it was these aspects which first drew me to Amizade when they first asked me to develop their website in 2010.

So when they approached me earlier this year about redesigning the site again, I was thrilled. Continuing relationships with great clients are one of the most rewarding aspects of web design and development, seeing an organizations needs grow, change, and developing something that will help all of this come together for them makes me a better developer and results in their having a superior product, in my opinion.

This time around, the focus was largely on making the site responsive, and creating a variety of different templates that could be used to showcase the programs they offer, the sites around the world that volunteers can apply to visit, and different layouts for various other types of information. When a site begins to get complex, specifically with a variety of multi-column layouts that need to accommodate everything from an iPhone 4 to the larger phablets (a lame name for the big phones like Android seems to run on and iPhone 6 Plus, for example) to the now relatively standard retina display laptops everyone has these days, things can get a little hairy.

We ended up with a beautiful, functional site though, and with only about a billion hours of testing I was able to make sure that the site would display and work properly across just about every device available today.

In addition to the design and responsive nature of the site, some of the tech that went into it was WordPress as a CMS (of course), along with Easy Digital Downloads to facilitate the sale of postcards offered by Amizade. The postcards themselves are quite beautiful, and warrant at least a gander if not a buy.

A miniature interactive map, tiled featured blog posts on the home page, Gravity Forms integration…there’s a ton going on behind the scenes and front and center. But what I love the most about the site, all of this just sort of falls to the wayside as the story and mission of the site is front and center.

So enough rambling, check out the new Amizade.org.

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