2 New Websites this Week

I brought 2 new websites to life this week and they are both for organizations that are doing great work.

New York Yearly Meeting

The development of this site has been a long-term project working with the Communications Committee and staff of New York Yearly Meeting, the organization of Quaker meetings in New York state and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.  This project consisted of an entirely new Drupal site, the migration of some content from an old html site, and the development of much new content.    My role was to do the Drupal design and creation, organize and manage volunteers to migrate and write content, edit and review the content and finally to deploy the site on a new hosting service.

Features of this site include:

• Lots of new dynamic content
• Online calendar of events
• RSS feed
• fresh graphic design
• online donations
• coming soon will be online event registration

Here, I'm helping volunteers migrate content in a 'not-so-old-fashioned' Quaker workcamp.  From left, Claire Simon (facing away),  Kathy Thomas, me (standing), Lee Maxwell, and Susan Bingham.  Not pictured were volunteers Heather Cook and Jon Baily-Savory.

Ubuntu in Action

I was just finishing reading the book Three Cups of Tea, about Greg Mortensen's work building peace by building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and feeling very moved and inspired, when I received an email from Etienne Mashuli of Ubuntu in Action.  Etienne and the rest of the Ubuntu organization are doing similar work in the African Great Lakes region (Rwanda, Burundi, eastern DRC and Tanzania, an area that has been devastated by war and genocide in the last 2 decades.  Etienne himself grew up in this area and is now a student in the United States.  I was honored to be able to contribute to this project by designing a new website for Ubuntu in Action, to help spread the word and raise funds for this vitally important work.

Features include:

• lots of graphic design elements and photographic content
• online donations
• easy for visitors to post and share to social networks and email
• RSS feed
• automatic backup
• live Twitter feed