I took over this project halfway through due to communication issues between the client and the previous web designer.
The original designer had created the logo but the client didn’t have a clear brand strategy in mind, and the original draft that the web designer created did not meet their vision, but they were having some problems communicating that vision clearly.
As I’ve been working with the client (in a different capacity – I teach personal safety education as a contractor for them!) I was already aligned with the kaupapa of the organisation and knew what kind of look and feel they were after.
Here is a screenshot of their original site.
It is a product of its time. It was created sometime in the 1990s and had not been updated since. It is a site created on WordPress, but as a product of the 1990s, was designed as a static site and, like any site that services an organisation for a few years, there had been bits and pieces tacked on with no overall planning or vision.
We needed to update it and also to ensure that the whole site was fully translated into te reo Māori. The original site had bits translated, but it wasn’t using a translation engine, and so links would sometimes come back to the English version.
The new site was created on Wix.com instead of WordPress (the project had started there, and it was easier to continue instead of starting again), and uses the Wix translation engine (with text inputted by our translator) to switch between the two languages.
We used the Wix plugins with Stripe to facilitate donations and the rest of the site is static.
We used the blog engine to drive the media articles, so that we can “publish” them at the correct dates (i.e. the dates that the original article was published) and we will use the Events Module to advertise current and upcoming public courses.
Vivian Chandra 