Visit peopleshealthclinic.org

Designing for a Cause

This year I had the opportunity to give a little back to the community I live in. In September 2009 I found myself in a meeting with Sarah Klingenstein, Community Outreach Coordinator at People’s Health Clinic and before I knew it I was volunteering to completely rework the clinic’s web presence and replace their antiquated site with a spankin’ new design and build. After thinking over what I had just gotten myself into, I decided to reach out for a little help in completing the undertaking so I contacted Bryan Hoffman of Spigot Design. Since I was thinking a WordPress site would be ideal for this project, and knowing Bryan’s own penchant for WordPress, I thought this might be a perfect collaboration for a good cause. I met with Bryan and although he barely knew me at the time, offered up his services willingly. We decided I would handle all the design and content for the site as well as the client side, and he would concentrate on building the WordPress theme and handling all the front-end development.

I set off to mapping out the site and designing the needed templates and styles and then handed it off to Bryan to create a fully functioning WordPress theme. Bryan turned around a nearly flawless execution of my original design with very few changes needed, and we were off to the races plugging in content and finalizing the final details. Finally in March the site officially went live and replaced the old PHC site and the staff at the clinic have been busily blogging and updating and getting to know their new toy. They are loving the WordPress backend and don’t for a second miss opening Dreamweaver to try to make simple changes and add content.

In the past I’ve had mixed feelings about pro-bono work, sometimes feeling a little taken advantage of or used by the time it is over – but not so in working with Sarah and the crew at People’s Health. They were an absolute joy to work with, respecting the boundaries, keeping comments and changes reasonable, and always extremely appreciative of our efforts. I only wish every project could run as smooth and be as enjoyable as this. While our lawmakers argue and squabble and call each other names, People’s Health Clinic actually does real health care work every day and offer a tremendous service to our community. And remember, the clinic runs entirely on private donations from people like you, so drop by the site and throw the clinics a few bones if you can. www.peopleshealthclinic.org/support-phc/

I’d especially like to publicly thank Bryan Hoffman for donating his spare time to get this project done right. He was a pleasure to work with and I look forward to future collaborations with Bryan. You can check out Bryan’s work at www.spigotdesign.com or his take on the project here.