Acorns Community Preschool Website

Types of work completed:

• Editing of content & light re-writes

• Website design & creation from start to finish (including testing, migrating domain)

• Training staff in how to use CMS

• Creating a user guide for their files

 

Acorns Community Preschool is a local charity organisation that is just around the corner from where I live. At the time my daughter was attending Acorns, and they sought me out after learning of my skills because they desperately needed a new website. Their ancient website was a html beast that was impossible for the staff to edit and that had increasingly been getting out of date. I was more than happy to help them out. Being a small community organisation that had a thriving word of mouth reputation they didn't need a super slick website. We agreed something simple would suffice, especially as they didn't have much budget they could allocate.

 

I began by taking all the existing content and grouping it into logical grouped sections and created a simplified website architecture that would help both current and prospective parents find the information they might want to look for. I didn't write much content from scratch but did edit for clarity extensively.

 

We had agreed on a WordPress website that would be easy for staff to add text to, without requiring too much know-how. I was limited to the free templates that were available, settling on one that had an academic theme that the preschool team liked. I then set about populating the website, inserting images for effect and filling in microdata and completing testing. I helped the office manager to transfer their original domain from the old website to the new, and to get the website live.

 

I also wrote a user-guide with screenshots for the back-end of the website that would take staff through any regular tasks they might need to do, along with FAQs. I spent about an hour with two team members where I demonstrated how to do their most common tasks and answered questions.

 

All in all, this quick and simple project was just over 2 days work for me (not including staff training).