I love writing my yearly launch recap post. It helps me reflect on the work I did from a different perspective and celebrate the missions of the nonprofits I supported this year. (And these are only a few of the organizations that I help with website support and maintenance.)
Websites are just tools that support organizations as they work toward their missions to improve the world.
2019 Site Recap
It’s a moment where I can feel good about how I contribute to the work of organizations impacting my local community.
Trends for 2023
Through all my work, I noticed a few consistent themes:
- More distributed leadership and collaboration: I have more and more clients using less hierarchical org charts with co-EDs and distributed decision making. This is an exciting trend that I think can lead to a more inclusive and equitable nonprofit sector, but also comes with growing pains. I’m having to think harder about how I collaborate with people and help them navigate their internal decision-making processes.
- Modern WordPress FWIW! This was the first year I launched any sites using the new WYSIWYG WordPress “Site Editor”, and also the year where I really adopted a full embrace of editing with blocks. I still have strong opinions about how the editor should work and my own plugin to wrangle the features for content editors, but I’m finally seeing the power of blocks, block patterns, and template parts empower my site editors to build more interesting sites. On my end, I feel like I am finding a path to build “hybrid themes” that offer powerful site features while embracing modern WordPress development techniques, particularly the
theme.jsonfile. - Refreshes >Redesigns. Whether a site is getting a new design, a new feature, or new content, I think it’s time we got rid of the classic “redesign” project that throws everything out and starts fresh. The nature of the web means that nothing is set in stone and things can always be improved. We can use that to our advantage to work in bite-sized chunks instead of overwhelming mega-projects. I’m focusing on helping clients shift toward doing smaller iterative projects. These projects are easier to focus on and complete and spread the budget out across a longer time frame.
Keta Legacy Foundation
The Keta Legacy Foundation works in Kitsap County to conserve 256 acres of land including a Rhododendron Garden and the “Big Tree”. It also makes grants to organizations in the Pacific Northwest to educate, preserve, and restore our local natural environments.
2023 saw multiple sites I worked on using various parts of the most cutting-edge features in WordPress, starting with this site. This project took advantage of the new “Full Site Editing” capabilities in recent versions of WordPress to closely recreate the existing site design in a more user-friendly and future-friendly way.
Washington Trails Association Accessibility Improvements
This was another fabulous year working with my favorite hiking organization in the world! As a long-time user of the WTA site, I’m always thrilled to get to contribute to improvements to it.
In 2023, I was able to implement a tremendous number of accessibility improvements on the WTA site! We eliminated every contrast problem we could find and made the site mostly navigable by keyboard (up from nearly impossible). We also did some user experience work to improve submitting Trip Reports in ways we hope will lead to more reports over time in combination with other changes.
All Girl Everything Ultimate Program (AGE UP)
AGE UP is an organization that knows how to have a lot of fun, and this site rebuild was all about making it possible to show the impact on kids they have in South Seattle. Their previous site had some significant speed and management issues, so we rebuilt the site using the WordPress site editor. We kept all the great parts of the old design—if get know the banner, you know!—and added some new colors and block styles to allow more exciting page layouts.
AGE UP did a fabulous job of starting to post more news on their site and improve how they showcase their work to both potential participants and potential donors.
RVC Refresh
RVC is an incredible organization in Seattle that strengthens small organizations with capacity-building services and fiscal sponsorship. (This includes fiscally sponsoring AGE UP!) They are a national leader in envisioning a more inclusive, resilient, and vibrant nonprofit sector.
This project continued the theme of taking a solid design and polishing it while implementing a new, significantly more usable editing interface. My contact at RVC brought their excellent illustration, design, and communications skills to our work, so the project was especially collaborative throughout. Working closely together, we removed old features that weren’t needed, added new ones that will serve them into the future (like a calendar feature), and introduced new designs to extend the RVC brand. (Be sure to hover over their site logo!)
Read more about my work with RVC in my portfolio.
Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence
The Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence is working in King County to end “all forms of gender-based violence including domestic violence, sexual trafficking, and”any form of violence that is rooted in rigid gender roles that reinforce the power imbalance between men and women.” The Coalition is an impressive organization that does so many different things, which makes it hard to squeeze it all into a concise website!
This was a challenging and exciting project. The organization had adopted their new name five years prior with a new logo and colors to go with it. This project was all about reassessing and improving how the organization presented itself both in text and style. We kept—and expanded!—their use of vibrant colors, but introduced curved shapes and photos and illustrations of people to humanize their work. With the help of prebuilt page layout “patterns”, the WordPress editing interface lets site editors quickly build interesting and consistent pages that show the organization at its best.
This project resulted in an up-to-date and clearer representation of the organization than they had before. We really think it’s going to make help them increase their impact as they work with and support their coalition’s members.
Read more about my work with the Coalition in my portfolio.
Camp Fire Seattle
Camp Fire Seattle is one of my oldest clients and one of my favorite sites to work on since it always makes me want to be a kid again and go to camp. They run year-round programs as well as a very popular summer camp on Vashon Island.
Camp Fire’s site was approaching 8 years old and it was time to make the site more modern both in its design and content management. As a very large site, much of this project focused on ensuring we had accounted for all the special features built into the site to make it easy to find and sign up for camps and programs. The new design features bigger pictures and easier-to-navigate layouts that help people find what they need faster. Launched right before summer camp registration started, we heard lots of positive feedback and almost no negative feedback.
(Fun story: My friend Mike sent his kids to a Camp Fire camp last year. Knowing I worked on the site, he let me know that it would be useful to provide a quick link to the camp registration site in the header. So we did! I really can’t overstate how valuable getting feedback is from real website users.)
Plugin Updates
I also still have a few plugins that I maintain, primarily for my client sites though I know others in the WordPress community appreciate them.
MRW Simplified Editor
This plugin needs to be updated after every WordPress release because it implements tons of changes to the default behavior that make the admin easier to manage for content-focused site editors. In 2023, I updated this plugin seven times. I just got the nicest 5-star plugin review (“sets editors free”!) and accompanying blog post. That’s certainly the goal, and it’s awesome to hear others find it similarly useful.
Post Type Archive Descriptions
This is a super simple plugin but adds a very useful feature I use on ~1/3 of sites I build. This year saw a single update that greatly improved the code quality and adjusted a feature based on feedback from another developer.
What a year!
I’m feeling great about the sites I launched, and see no reason why they won’t be chugging along happily and healthily in another 3, 5, or even 10 years with sufficient care and maintenance! The web keeps changing, but with enough effort and planning, we can keep up-to-date with those changes and ensure that site visitors can find the information and use the functions they need on each site.
Looking ahead, I’ve already got new projects in motion, a new plugin submitted to the WordPress.org repository awaiting review, a million blog posts I want to write, a presentation at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (I’ll see you in Portland!), and plenty of yet-to-arise tasks both small and large. It should be a good year for MRW Web Design!