The Walk In Our Shoes website has been so helpful this past week but for an entirely different reason to the ones you'd expect!
I've been working with Steph Phillips on World Childless Week. As you may remember, I wrote lots of posts and interviewed a number of Walk In Our Shoes supporters for the first World Childless Week last year and I was proud to support Steph on this venture.
Since then we spoke about the branding and the website. In my other guise, I am a graphic designer and work on web design amongst other collateral, creating sites from scratch or customising and designing templates in WordPress or Squarespace. I have also worked on branding for large businesses like United Parcel Service and Teenage Cancer Trust to smaller start-ups. Steph was keen to use a logo with a supporting branding structure to keep a visual control of World Childless Week in 2018. I think it's fair to say it was far more popular than she had anticipated!
Over November I developed a branding package for WCW, starting with what will soon become a very familiar forget-me-not logo and a set of guidelines that cover typography, colours, ethos and tone of voice. This month began the epic task of getting the website together.
Steph has lots of content from 2017 and she wanted a consistent look to help with navigation. After a brief chat, Steph selected Squarespace as she liked the easy interface. We spent many hours on Zoom chats as I trained her on how to create pages, good SEO principles and site mapping. Steph diligently completed her homework as I began to add in custom code and ensure the branding worked on the site. She is the perfect client!
Walk In Our Shoes is one of many sites I've designed using Squarespace but my most recent website for a client was using Drupal! So it was good to look at Walk In Our Shoes, remember what I did this time last year and test out a few updates from Squarespace!
You can see the all new World Childless Week website here and I'm delighted that Steph will be adding an article to our blog in the future with news of 2018's events. Do let her know what you think by leaving a comment on her site!
You'll also notice that our blog has changed. I found a nifty way around presenting our blog page that will make it easier to find recent articles. If you're looking for a specific article or phrase then there's a new search field which will sniff out the blog page results. Do let me know if you find these useful! If you miss our old blog, it's still here!
The new World Childless Week website cover page