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Simone Seagle

Simone Seagle

Independent Web and Educational Software Developer

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ECHO Inc Website
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ECHO Inc Website

September 20, 2017 Simone Seagle

ECHO Inc. is a non-profit located in Farmington, NM that runs food banks, a preschool, and has emergency assistance programs for underserved populations. Their previous website (below) had been created many years ago by a volunteer who was also a software engineer. Unfortunately, it wasn't meeting the needs of the staff or the community because it was hard for staff to update and was not mobile compatible.

A screenshot of the old website

The previous website, via the Internet Wayback Machine

The main considerations when building the website were:

  1. Easy for staff to update
  2. Mobile compatible - in many low income households, the only way for them to access the internet is their mobile device
  3. Bring all of the ways that ECHO can help the community forward
  4. Cost effective

For building the website, I selected WordPress because it hits points 1, 2, and 4 right on the head. It would have been possible to use Drupal, but I felt like that would be massive overkill. WordPress also has many beautiful themes that are either free or inexpensive. The CEO selected the Charitas theme for the website, which I further customized.

In order to address point 3 aand to update the old content, I worked with Randall Gann with Gann PR to do all of the page rewrites and much of the information restructuring. All in all, I believe the website is successful in meeting the goals we set out for the project - it was inexpensive, easier to view and read, and has much better information hierarchy.