- We already had a pretty good idea of the client's needs and goals from the client survey filled out by Susan Partnow on Mike's website. However, the meeting with Jeannine (Susan is still in Africa until next week) shed some more light on what exactly GCJ wants to accomplish:
- They feel their current site is much too busy, with too much copy. They want to feature their photo collections (perhaps with jQuery slideshows) and videos more extensively.
- They want to have a blog, an events section, an e-newsletter, and feature more prominent links to their sections on various projects and other resources.
- They definitely want to have more of a "Web 2.0" presence, including integrating the blog with Facebook. One of Jeannine's questions to us was whether "it makes sense for them to tweet," to which I responded "absolutely yes without a doubt!" (as Twitter helps immensely with networking, SEO, and disseminating information)
- They would like their site to be a source of education on the various countries involved in their projects.
- They may like to do a products section down the road, including t-shirts and greeting cards. They currently have a section with links to books from Amazon, but no one has enable the function where GCJ gets a percentage of those orders.
- They like the site for EarthJustice... this could give some direction to the designers.
- They would like to do some SEO and will have suggestions on industry-specific keywords, but Jeannine was receptive to our warnings that SEO tactics are often a "hit-or-miss" endeavor when it comes to final Google rankings.
- We agreed to have some benchmarks, to be signed off on by Susan, in order to avoid scope creep.
- User demographics: typical users for the site are either college students looking for global jobs or public affairs jobs, or retirees making $70K+ who have travelled and have an interest in the region. They would like to attract both new volunteers, who would be locally based, and delegates, who would travel to the countries where the project is occurring.
- The current (reluctant) webmaster of the site is Susan's son, Tyler Peckenpaugh. He is not very fond of Wordpress, and may require a bit of training after the redesign is complete. From the information provided by Jeannine, I was able to access the server (HostMySite) control panel and create a new FTP user for the team, and download all the contents of the site (500MB). I got in contact with Tyler to get additional passwords for Wordpress admin, Google Analytics, and the old site stats.
- More notes from Bill's Client Interview Checklist:
- There is currently a MySQL database included, and applications installed (e.g. a donation button, cart).
- The organization is a 501(c)3, but they seem happy with their current host.
TIME SPENT: 1.25 hours.
Abell,
ReplyDeleteAwesome job!!
Bill