The Client

When I heard about 48in48, a volunteer organization that builds websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours, I was intrigued. When I learned that this year would be the first event for women by women, I was hooked. I pulled my crew together and we were paired with Research Methods Made Easy (RSMME). They are on a mission to help college students and early career professionals with research and analysis.

The Challenge

Eliza and her husband John both have serious credentials in research and data analytics. They’ve recently moved their teaching initiative from Ghana to the USA, and needed a new website to reflect their offerings, attract the right users, and handle online registration.

Some volunteers gathered Eliza’s initial wish list. As the project manager for the endeavor, I had to complete the requirements and fine-tune the plan for what we could do in a weekend.

It was one wild ride! We has a Google Meet session that lasted the entire 48 hours, 3 Slack channels, 2 Trello boards and a partridge in a pear tree. Or at least, that’s how it felt to me!

The Solution

Working with a team is so very different from the one-woman show that I usually have going on. Having backup is amazing! Margo, the graphic designer, and I decided to keep their original orange accent color, and switch out the black for a complimentary blue. Margo selected fonts and created the logo, and selected stock images to fill out the site.

I chose the template and set up the web pages. Ashley and Sara waded through oodles of content from the original site. They organized and streamlined the copy.  Nikita and Kristi handled plugin setup and page edits. So very many edits…

But we got it done. We were actually the 4th out of 48 teams to get through QA and be approved to go live. Exhilarating!

The Reaction

The Original Website