As the semester moves along, the Little Miss Sunshines have begun our team meetings outside of the classroom. After looking at various examples of websites for similar organizations, we gathered a feel for the kind of items that we may want to include on our design of the Sunshine Anderson House website. Each member of the group has been working with different aspects of the project and up until this point most of it had to do with the "getting started" stage of the project. As a whole, we have asked questions about what to and what not to include on the website, what pictures would be allowed (in respect to copyrights), what links we wanted to include on our webpage and how we wanted to present the organization.
As we have now already collected the research, we have started assigning group members different tasks to get us closer to completing the website. Our web designer, Ashley, has been working on creating the website and its features. She has already made links titled About Us, Getting Help, Donate Here, and Ways to Volunteer. We would also like to add a "Fundraiser" link in which we hope to explain a little bit about them as well as how you can participate. She has also mentioned the idea of having buttons instead of links for the different parts of the site.
Ideas for layout of this website in terms of the information are as follows. For our home page, we were thinking about putting the mission statement of the Anderson Sunshine House followed by a letter from either one or both of our lovely women in charge of this organization to say a little blurb about what it means to them or what they are about (This will really give them a chance to say in their own words what they want others to know). We would also like to include a success story of one of the people who has been helped by the organization, with their permission of course.
On our next link, About Us, we would like to put a little bit of history in bullet format to give the reader more knowledge about what has been done and what hopefully will be done. Our Getting Help page will include information on who they help (especially families with children), some of the requirements for receiving services, and contact information. On our Donate Here link we will include a list of physical items that the organization needs and maybe some quotes from people who have donated or been helped by the donations (anonymous, of course). We considered putting paypal on this link but chose not to and instead will include a p.o. box that checks can be mailed to. We will justify the decision not to use paypal in our proposal. Right now we are considering the possibility of combining the volunteer tab with the donate here tab to make the links less redundant.
In the upcoming week our activities will be along these lines. Ashley will continue modifying our web page and designing the physical appearance of each page, as well as creating necessary links, finding pictures and other items to place on each link. Mary Beth has been elected to our class's peer review committee and will also be finding out more information about what ASH volunteers do, how we can apply clip-art, and will write the information out that will be on the Donors page. Lauren will be writing two links: Getting Help and Fundraising Links. Nina will do the writing on the History link and will also be in charge of keeping up with our minutes and making sure everyone has a copy. Alex will be in charge of receiving the writing for each link and editing each to make sure that it all flows together and sounds professional. She will also be in charge of the paper this week to inform our teacher of what progress has been made as well as creating the team blog and publishing the first update.
