I started at Adolescent Counseling Services in December 2007. In my interview, I remember being asked what I thought of the website, as it had been redesigned just the year before after an extremely lengthy process of working with pro-bono web designers. I lied. I said it was great. And, I got the job.
7 months later, I became Development & Marketing Director and made it a personal mission to get ACS’ website redesigned and updated. Of course, not having any clue about web design, not having money, not having anyone with the expertise, and not having the time were major barriers. When I left ACS in 2013, I was pretty disappointed that I was leaving without having realized one of my personal goals for the agency.
Good thing life sometimes gives you second chances. Shortly after I came back to ACS this year, I found out we received a transition grant (since ACS had acquired a pre-existing program) and part of the grant was earmarked to be spent on….a website redesign!!!!!!!!
To top it off, we have a newish board member who has the expertise and knows how to actually go about redesigning a website. AND, this board member volunteered to help me make this 6 year dream a reality.
We decided to use WordPress, we picked a theme, I met with staff, did a wireframe of the structure, started writing content…and then at the end of July, we locked ourselves in the conference room and weren’t coming out until there was a new website up.
Our old website was bad. Really bad. Just take a look for yourself.
It was hard to navigate, content was everywhere, there was no good place to put updates and events, and it looked like it was straight out of the year 2000. We were losing potential clients – and probably donors – with our web presence so we decided we need to start from scratch. Since July, I’ve been writing website content, writing copy, buying photos, building pages, and doing everything I can to improve ACS’ website.
Voila!
Four scrolling images on the homepage:
Clean homepage that clearly states what our programs are:
And, every possible way to connect with us. Not all over the place, but in an organized fashion:
I’m incredibly proud of what I accomplished, but talk about a labor of love! It’s still a work in progress for sure, but it’s leaps and bounds better than what we had. Most importantly, I hope it’s easy for parents and teens in need to navigate and figure out what we do and who to contact.
Also, thank God for YouTube and everyone who has posted videos or tutorials on how to do a lot of the technical things (like install widgets or calendars or blog feeds or twitter feeds or html code to nicely format text). I hope you’ll take a look and check it out. www.acs-teens.org