It has been a while since we've posted to this blog. It's not that we have not been busy -- just the opposite. Since the last post, we prepared for and made two trips to Kenya, we had a party for our supporters, we have had fundraisers, we have funded scholarships for Villagers to go to school, and so much more. We have not spent as much time communicating with our supporters as we wanted, but we are changing that.
The biggest change is to rewrite our website (http://www.imaniproject.org) from the ground up.
As you may know, our previous website had fallen out of date, and the cost and technical complexity of keeping it updated became an obstacle. We decided to take a new direction, and recreate the site using tools that we could manage on our own without outsourcing the development.
We spent the last two months rewriting the pages, updating the orphan descriptions and photos, uploading videos, and getting it all working. This has taken the work and cooperation of the entire Board of Directors and others. It isn't finished; we will continue to evolve the design and add more information and photos. We hope that you like the new look and navigation, but even more, we hope you find it easier to get information about the Imani Project and our efforts in Kenya.
The new site is built using Xara Web Designer 9 Premium, which provides a visual design interface for laying out pages The biggest challenge was to create the page that lists the 90 sponsored orphans in such a way that we can regenerate the page easily when orphan information and photos change (which they do often). We hit on a solution where we keep our master list in a Microsoft Word document for easy editing. We use Word's mail merge to transform the data into a table, and then save the result as an HTML page. After a few search and replace actions in the HTML page, it is ready to publish. The whole process takes about 30 minutes, and no hand coding of the web page is needed!
We hope you like results if our efforts. Please look at the website, share it with your friends, and send us feedback on what else we can do to help you stay connected with your Kenyan friends.
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