Women for Women

05/29/2020

Women for Women provides educational, economic, health, legal, and vocational assistance to marginalized women, in the hopes that these women can create sustainable change in their lives and the lives of their families.

From Complicated to Simple

DesignStudio’s relationship with Women for Women began when a former marketing executive from the American Red Cross called us up and asked us to join her new team at Women for Women. At the time, another company managed the Women for Women website. The website was run on a Drupal platform and was incredibly complicated. The company that designed the website charged a lot of money for a website that the team at Women for Women could not work with on their own. Women for Women always had to reach out to the company for help changing things on the website. Women for Women wanted an easy-to-work-with website platform. Their current web developer didn’t want to give that to them.

Story

DesignStudio took over and finished the web design job and finished it right. Our team of developers took the existing platform and modified it so that the team at Women for Women could make simple changes and modifications on their own. The website went from being a complicated mess that could only be managed by experts to a simple, easy-to-understand, platform that the Women for Women team could feel comfortable working with on a daily basis.

DesignStudio solely focused on cleaning up the work of the original vendor during that first retainer. As DesignStudio worked on the website, Women for Women gave our team a “wish list” of what they wanted in their finished website. We added a few extra items to that wish list and our amazing team worked relentlessly and finished everything within the first 100 hours of the retainer.

With the second retainer (AKA round two), DesignStudio shifted gears and focused on adding new templates and pages to the website. One of these pages is the “She Inspires Me” page, which is part of a year-long campaign that is one of Women for Women’s central projects right now. The landing page itself is incredibly specialized and incorporates a software service that aggregates social media content based on the campaign’s core hashtag “#SheInspiresMe.”

The challenge here has been ensuring that all the content moved from social media to the landing page is appropriate and relevant to the campaign. The software DesignStudio incorporated has been a huge help in filtering the “noise” and creating a successful campaign landing page.

This is a huge project that DesignStudio is still working on with Women for Women in terms of refining and improving.

The new Women for Women website is exactly what the client wanted. It is responsive, easy to manage, and mobile-friendly. DesignStudio continues to work with Women for Women, and we are now in our third-round retainer with the company. Currently, we are ensuring that the site continues to run flawlessly, through our monitoring and maintenance.