The challenge
Hospitals for Humanity is a nonprofit organization that works to provide quality and affordable health care through Medical Mission Initiatives to developing countries including Nigeria and Haiti.
With a website originally created with Yahoo! SiteBuilder and then added to over the course of a year, HFH’s site was like a double wide with ungainly additions. The initial challenge was to clean up the site in time for a fundraiser a week later. Using Yahoo! SiteBuilder, I reorganized and consolidated information, incorporated the organization’s logo, attended to SEO with page titles and image tags, made a consistent navigation bar, resized skewed photos to maintain their aspect ratio, aligned graphics and touched-up the site styling including background colors and page headers. You can see the before and after here.
After the fundraiser, I had the chance to rebuild the site from scratch, making significant and more time-intensive improvements. (See final image in post.)
Design highlights
Due to the limitations of Yahoo! SiteBuilder, I chose to redesign HFH’s site using Adobe Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, and WordPress. Prior to touching the site, however, I redrew the organization’s logo, adding variety to the typography and recasting the globe to include more of the continents. (See logos at right: original logo on the left, redesigned logo on the right.) I based the image of the earth on the Robinson projection in light of the organization’s commitment to equity and its ongoing work in Africa and Haiti.
Then to innovate HFH’s new site, I began by researching similar organizations to see what elements their websites included. I created a custom header and layout, prioritized the pages as either belonging in the upper or lower navigation bars, and transferred info from the old site to the new. I created original text where needed. I sorted through photos and touched them up for use on every page to visually support the text.
I created Flash billboards for the home page, so that current info had top billing on the site and could be updated as needed. All of the pages were created in WordPress, which functioned as a CMS with the intent that organization workers could update the content on those pages as needed. I found and installed plug-ins for the forms, calendar, and photo galleries. I created a favicon to extend the organization’s branding into the browser bar and heighten the professionalism and credibility of the new site. The result is below.
To support HFH and further explore the site, please visit www.HospitalsForHumanity.org today!
