Give A Child Life

The new web site for Give A Child Life has launched!

The big day has finally arrived. After months of work, the new web site for Give A Child Life has launched. Check it out at www.giveachildlife.org. Don’t hesitate to send in your feedback—we want to hear from you. The whole purpose of the site is to keep up relationships with the GCL Family—and that includes you!

 

So much work went into this---from Alex and Laura Bennett doing the design work and visualizations to Bethany Nicoson going over every small detail to myself writing and re-writing the text. By the time we finished, I felt as if we had completed a book. And it’s not over…the beauty of the web is that constant revisions are easy. And there will be revisions---because we want this site to work for each of you.

 

Look it over…think about it…and get back to us. Now that the Web site is up, we can re-focus our attention and concentrate on developing programs to help the most vulnerable kids in the world. Thanks for caring!

The importance of connectivity.

 

For the past two months, I’ve been working with our creative team on Give A Child Life’s new web site. I’ve developed content for other web sites, but this was different. As I drafted various pages, I realized that the architecture of the site needed to reflect the structure of the relationship with GCL’s donors. This was a bit of a revelation. Previously I’d thought of web sites and media products for nonprofit organizations primarily as flat, or one-dimensional pieces designed to convey information, provoke emotions and/or trigger responses. But while working on the GCL site, I understood the importance of connectivity. I saw the need to create a site that did much more than provide information—it needed to make viewers feel a part of GCL. Technology today allows much more reciprocity than in the past. But it can be difficult to wrap your mind around how to do it.

 

In looking at other web sites, I realized something else. If we wanted to reach our friends and co-workers in developing countries, our web site couldn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. In the U.S. or Europe, we imagine that everyone has high speed access. But many don’t, especially those living in developing countries. So we need to create a web site that works today, but doesn’t require fast Internet speeds and high capacity.

 

Below is the home page we started with….in a month or so, you’ll see where we wound up.