PROJECT DETAILS: This was a huge undertaking from House Rabbit Resource Network (HRRN) with a complete redesign in both the template design and contents of the website itself. My small team and I shifted the focus from just a simple donation and shelter news site, to a more robust rabbit resource website, while still maintaining the donation drive for the shelter rabbits.
CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS: This project was started in 2018 after getting pre-approved to create a new website for the rabbit shelter. The first year was spent making notes on what was needed on the website and how it should function, then creating a Trello board with everything from website colors, branding, pages, links, to adoptable rabbits, accepting donations, and creating a place for volunteers to apply. It was a huge undertaking and soon after I had a small team of two other people assisting me with making sure everything was in place for the website to be built.
One member of the team focused on the internal page content and copy, while the other created a space for the website on his server and worked to build a plugin to display the rabbits available for adoption. We ran meetings once a month for a while as we got started and I managed the team while working on the template and coding for the initial website design. Once the build was about halfway completed, we had a few members of the Board look it over and offer suggestions and critiques. We implemented any changes that made sense into the website design and worked on and off on this massive redesign for several years.
Finally, in 2023 (during the Chinese year of the rabbit as a bonus), the website was very close to completion. I worked to finalized the website ensuring all links worked, all images loaded, all forms functioned as intended and all donation links could accept funds. We launched the website in September and it went through one and a half weeks of debugging and corrections after launch but it's now the refreshed, official home for our robust rabbit resource and rabbit adoptions.
SKILLS/PROGRAMS USED: The template for the website is the Pet Shop theme from VW Themes and the website was entirely built on WordPress. The logo, images and content/copy were provided by House Rabbit Resource Network (HRRN). Extra images were taken with permission from HRRN or other websites (with full credits). Additional programming for this site was hand-coded within Adobe Dreamweaver and uses HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Bootstrap and MySQL. Special thanks to Chani and Ryan who assisted with this project.
