Helping children in Kenya
Alright guys, this one is for the team! We love investing our time in awesome stuff. Usually we invest 1 day a week to innovate and build products for others, for free. Especially products we believe in. But this time, we wanted to give something back to the world, because the woman who approached us for the redesign of her website is a one man band who is helping children in Kenya, all by herself.
Their
question
Can you help us redesign our website? The current one is outdated, hard to maintain, and the donation forms are not working anymore!
Our
answer
Oh no! We mean, oh yes! Yes we can help you! - We took a very clean approach to this request and decided to simplify our research to narrow down best practices and design something from there straight away.
Collect
So first we roamed multiple website to look at best practices, and have a better understanding of how most small charities showcase themselves to the world.
Interesting enough it seems that not many of those superheroes are being helped by anyone properly. The websites are often broken, badly designed, build, and maintained. We immediately knew that this is something we don't want to let happen. But the question is, why does this happen so easily?
Understand
During our exploration we came to realize that a lot of small charities are using content management systems and functionalities that are way beyond their maintenance capacity.
In order to keep something running properly on WordPress you often need a few team members to work on it daily because it comes packed with technical features. This was definitely not possible for the African Welfare Foundation. So we decided to go to our most beloved Webflow, a front-end design and management tools that works incredibly well for small content websites. It's super lightweight and does not require a lot of effort on the editor to maintain. I mean, we are living proof of this, our website runs on it too! 👌
Sketching
Well usually... we would have a phase where we would sketch ideas out with a team. In this case however, we decided to only sketch out three main goals. Which were; easy donations, easy publishing, and show the children.
We believed that by making the site light and focussed it would become much easier for Conny (the owner) to maintain and share her story.
Design, develop, launch!
Let's skip the fluff here. We designed, build, and launched the whole complete website, including automated SEO within 3 days. THREE days! We don't want to brag, but that is awesome.
Awards
Innovation award for the African Welfare Foundation website
User Experience award for the African Welfare Foundation website
Interface award for the African Welfare Foundation website
