WordPress Development for Workforce Warriors

As an faculty-appointed student team leader, I helped a real-life client, Workforce Warriors launch their website based on a bespoke design made by other students. This website replaced an outdated website and now represents them in a more appealing way.

Project

Phase two: Build it!

The web development effort for Workforce Warriors went from design to live in 10 weeks, based on a design they made previously.

Workforce Warriors, an Indigenous non-profit, had Algonquin College students from a previous semester create a new design to replace their outdated website with one that represented them better. They created the design in Adobe XD during their own 10 week design process. It included a mockup of a four-page website and all the visual assets that were required. During our semester, we work with three representatives from Workforce Warriors, and I lead a team of four other students. Our job was to develop a WordPress website based on the new design.

The XD file provided by the previous team. We used this file as our guide to development the website.

Objective

Out with the old, in with the new

The goal was to develop a functional website in WordPress to replace their existing website.

The main problem was the custom work required to align a WordPress theme to match the design. The design was bespoke and did not easily conform to the theme's prebuilt structure. We strove to make as little code-based changes to ensure our client would be able to maintain the CMS in the future.

I was uniquely positioned to replace the existing site and ensure ongoing custom domain email access due to my previous experience with domain providers.

Key objectives:

Develop a WordPress website based on the custom design in 10 weeks.
Replace their existing live website with the newly developed WordPress site

Work

Rise to the challenge

As team manager, I was its client liason, supervised the technical work, modify critical settings and held stakeholder interviews.

I assigned the team tasks in the project management software Basecamp and communicated with the client.
I provided support to the client to resolve technical issues related to providing us access or information.
I supervised the technical work and organized a review to resolve discrepencies to ensure alignment with the design.
I updated the DNS records to launch the new website without causing an outage the emails using the custom domain.
I guided our direction and strategy for the 10 week project.
I held three interviews of other stakeholders to provide feedback on the website's user experience.

Our team built the design using the block editor inside WordPress. Our goal was to ensure our clients would be able to continue updating the site after we delivered the project. So we made as many code-free edits as possible.

End Result

It lives!

We developed a functional, design-accurate site within 10 weeks.

We created a near exact replica of the initial Adobe XD designs using a WordPress theme.
We successfully launched the WordPress website within the 10 week window.
We provided a report with recommendations for future development to improve the user experience as well as the assets and development resources for the website.

The site was made live at the end of April 2023. Since then, they have been able to update their site. You can visit their current website at www.workforcewarriors.ca.

Reflection

Content is tough

Obtaining quality written content and images was a challenge. More user testing and content strategy could have improved the end result.

We found that written content was difficult to obtain due to time constraints. Unfortunately, a lot of the content had to be copied from the previous non-perfomant website. For future projects, I plan on budgetting time for content strategy to ensure the meta descriptions and text is working towards the organization's goals.

We found some material in the original design that may have been copied from paid sources. In the future, time will need to be allocated to ensuring permission and rights are acquired for all media being used in a website design.