Dec 20, 2009 Posted by Herko on Dec 20, 2009 in All things Web, Personal notes | 3 comments

New site for Child Support Ghana goes live!

Finally, after many hours of work, the new web­site for the Child Sup­port Ghana NGO and Dutch Foun­da­tions is live. Child Sup­port Ghana is a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion based in the Upper West Region (UWR) cap­i­tal Wa, Ghana, West Africa, who sup­port needy chil­dren by pro­vid­ing them with a roof over their head, lov­ing care, edu­ca­tion and health­care. This orga­ni­za­tion is the vehi­cle for the awe­some work my dad is doing in Ghana. His work is sup­ported by a Dutch Foun­da­tion who raise funds and vol­un­teers for the projects. Doing their web­site, has been a long stand­ing side project of mine.

Out with the old

In the old sit­u­a­tion, there were three dif­fer­ent places you could find new and out-dated infor­ma­tion about the var­i­ous projects and activ­i­ties. First there was the Wa Yiri Children’s Home web­site, which I quickly built using the Mambo con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. This was 2004 – 2005, and Mambo has matured a lot since those days. I used Mambo mainly because I needed a sys­tem that non-web-savvy peo­ple could use and pub­lish con­tent. But this turned out not to be such a good choice. The non-web-savvy peo­ple were non-Mambo-savvy peo­ple too –or bet­ter yet, Mambo wasn’t as user-friendly as it lead us to believe. So the infor­ma­tion pub­lished on the site quickly became out­dated and irrel­e­vant.
In feb­ru­ary 2005 my dad went to Ghana to find out if he could set­tle there –at least for a while, maybe even indef­i­nitely– and make a real change. He wanted a weblog to keep every­one informed of his trav­els, his jour­neys, his expe­ri­ences, and as he set­tled in more, his projects as well. His weblog was dubbed Under African Skies and became the major source of infor­ma­tion about the works of Child Sup­port Ghana. This is chiefly due to the fact that my dad could pub­lish all this infor­ma­tion, includ­ing photo’s, all by him­self (he doesn’t have run­ning water or is con­nected to a sewer sys­tem, but he does have an ADSL broad­band inter­net con­nec­tion –when there’s power…). And this was made pos­si­ble by the awe­some Word­Press blog­ging plat­form, which has grown in sheer awe­some­ness ever since those days. Now the new web­site is pow­ered by Word­Press too.
The third site you could find all kinds of infor­ma­tion about the project is the Child Sup­port Ghana Foun­da­tion web­site, the main web­site. This web­site should have been main­tained by the Board and vol­un­teers of the Child Sup­port Ghana. It was also cre­ated by me, and I was seen as the per­son who should keep it up to date. But, since I’m not the best at keep­ing sites up to date, this didn’t work very well. So this site con­tained out­dated infor­ma­tion as well, and as it is part of the offi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the Child Sup­port Ghana Foun­da­tion, this became a grow­ing prob­lem.
The solu­tion was simple.

In with the new

About a year ago, I decided to merge all three web­sites into one, using the Child Sup­port Ghana domain, where all infor­ma­tion is pub­lished by those who know it best. I cre­ated an infor­ma­tion struc­ture based on the avail­able infor­ma­tion and top­ics, and set out to val­i­date that at some of the vis­i­tors and users of the web­sites. It was tweaked a lit­tle, and accepted. I based the­new struc­ture as much on the infor­ma­tion that wasn’t avail­able, as on the infor­ma­tion that was. Thus, I hoped to cre­ate a con­tent strat­egy for the volunteer-driven site, ensur­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of com­pelling and moti­vat­ing con­tent.
Te new site caters to three dif­fer­ent groups of vis­i­tors. First and main, it’s tar­geted at poten­tial spon­sors and dona­tors. These are peo­ple who sup­port the projects Child Sup­port Ghana exe­cutes in Wa, because they feel con­nected and want to be involved in small and big­ger ways. So, the web­site needed to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about the projects and their mer­its. More so, it needs to sell the projects to draw peo­ple into the site, and make them think “some­thing spe­cial is going on here, I’d like to learn more about it!”. And for this kind of third world devel­op­ment work, noth­ing con­veys this bet­ter then photo’s of the peo­ple Child Sup­port is help­ing out. So on the home­page, I added a photo car­rousel (using JonDesign’s excel­lent Smooth­Gallery script) with photo’s of the projects.
I also learned that the sec­ond best way to sell the projects is to pro­vide authen­tic con­tent. This means that we’re not hid­ing the fact that work­ing in the Upper West Region of Ghana is dif­fi­cult, and that Child Sup­port Ghana is forced to make dif­fi­cult (some­times even life-and-death) deci­sions. By merg­ing Eric’s weblog into the new site, we’re ensured of hun­dreds of authen­tic posts filled with expe­ri­ences and anec­dotes of life in Ghana and the work of Child Sup­port Ghana.
Now that we have the vis­i­tors atten­tion, we need to make it easy for them to become involved in Child Sup­port Ghana, and donate funds and/or time and effort. Donat­ing funds is easy using the TipIt ser­vice, a quick dona­tion via iDeal and/or cred­it­card is avail­able on each and every page on the site. Since our main audi­ence is based in The Nether­lands and Bel­gium, iDeal and cred­it­cards basi­cally cov­ers the main means of doing online trans­ac­tions. If peo­ple want to par­tic­i­pate in other ways, there’s a whole sec­tion on how to sup­port Child Sup­port Ghana.
The other group we’re try­ing to con­vince to par­tic­i­pate on the site is the poten­tial vol­un­teers. These are good peo­ple who want to donate their skills and expe­ri­ence and par­tic­i­pate in the projects in Wa. This group is really look­ing for infor­ma­tion on the projects, try­ing to find what their value to those could be. Also, they’re look­ing for prac­ti­cal info about the life in Ghana, as well as infom on how to get in touch with the peo­ple behind Child Sup­port Ghana to see if going there for 6 months is a viable option. We try to pro­vide the nec­es­sary info on the site, but I still feel that’s the one area we don’t have enough infor­ma­tion –yet.
The third main group is English-speaking/reading vis­i­tors. As the suc­cess of Child Sup­port Ghana spreads through the news chan­nels of Ghana and other non-BeNeLux coun­tries, the need to pro­vide qual­ity infor­ma­tion in Eng­lish is grow­ing. More and more peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions abroad are sup­port­ing Child Sup­port Ghana now, so we cre­ated a whole new sec­tion just for Eng­lish content.

The new design

A large part of my time and effort went into the redesign of the site. This is because I’m never really sat­is­fied with the qual­ity of my skills and expe­ri­ence to cre­ate a really high-end design, but for this site, I tried push­ing my lim­its. First though, I went look­ing for inspi­ra­tion, and was awestruck by the beauty and effec­tive­ness of Rob Good­latte’s Wiser Girls theme. WISER is also a third world devel­op­ment project, sup­port­ing and run­ning a girls school in Africa. The design of the WISER site is stun­ning. I def­i­nitely didn’t want to copy and steal it, but as you can see, a lot of ele­ments from WISER went into the Child Sup­port Ghana site.
Because I didn’t want to copy it, I had to recre­ate the design. And to com­pli­cate things more, I decided to cre­ate the theme using the Car­ring­ton Blog theme frame­work for Word­Press, cre­ated by Crowd Favorite. This frame­work would allow me to cre­ate a flex­i­ble and sus­tain­able theme, which is easy to extend and add new tem­plate types to. This would make main­tain­ing the site eas­ier.
And to top it all off, as a self-proclaimed web­stan­dards advo­cate, I had to bring it all together in standards-compliant, seman­tic markup and stylesheets. Due to the com­plex­ity of the Car­ring­ton Blog theme, and try­ing to recre­ate a look and feel, I’m sure there are many many oppor­tu­ni­ties to opti­mise the code I used. But over­all, I’m quite happy with the results!

So, please take a look at the site, read through some of the projects, per­haps even read a few blog posts made by my dad, and let me know what you think of the new site!

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3 Responses to “New site for Child Support Ghana goes live!”

1. herko says:

   20 December 2009 at 17:06

   New blog post: New site for Child Sup­port Ghana goes live! http://www.herkocoomans.net/2009/12/new-site-for-child-support-ghana-goes-live/

   This com­ment was orig­i­nally posted on Twit­ter
2. Mr.Moses says:

   7 May 2010 at 22:52

   Dear sir/madam,
   All hands foun­da­tion poor chil­dren Is a com­mu­nity base (NGO) that works to
   sup­port poor chil­dren, bril­liant but needy, to undergo train­ing of their choice.

   The orga­ni­za­tion which is founds in Yeji Parambo-sawaba in Brong Ahafo
   Region in Ghana. Which is one of the poor com­mu­ni­ties in Brong Ahafo
   Region. Our tar­geted areas of oper­a­tion are deprived and rural ori­ented
   com­mu­ni­ties within the urban areas in Ghana. Though we have been try­ing
   our pos­si­ble best to give the chil­dren the best in live. But we are fac­ing a lot of chal­lenges which include finan­cial and edu­ca­tional
   facil­i­ties such as school build­ing, Library books and com­put­ers for stud­ies.
   There is no help from any­where to sup­port our aims and objec­tives for these
   Chil­dren. Farm­ing is our source of cap­i­tal in sup­port­ing the orga­ni­za­tion. We need sup­port from any Foun­da­tion that sup­ports NGO in Africa to sup­port us. We also need vol­un­teer from any coun­try to come and work with us or visit us.
   We need sup­port from any foun­da­tion that can sup­port us to improve Edu­ca­tion, cul­ture, farm­ing and the poten­tials of the chil­dren in the com­mu­nity. Please, how can we get access to your spon­sor­ship?
   We hope to hear from u soon.
   THANKS.
3. Centre for Information Technology (Tujifunze) says:

   11 June 2010 at 8:55

   The Cen­tre for Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy (Tujifunze)was estab­lished in March, 2003 by ded­i­cated founders, it was legally reg­is­tered after ful­fil­ment of all legal require­ments with the Min­istry of Home Affairs Tan­za­nia on March 23rd 2004,Certificate of Reg­is­tra­tion with So.No.12405 pro­vided and 17th Novem­ber 2006 reg­is­tra­tion of cer­tifi­cate of Com­pli­ance reg­is­tra­tion OONGO.No1721,cap.337

   Our Orga­ni­za­tion are divided into three projects 1) Chil­dren and women health projects, 2) ICT and Edu­ca­tion Projects) Dis­abil­i­ties Projects,

   Cur­rents we nurs­ery schools here Mwanza and Bukoba pro­vided free edu­ca­tion, and Inter­net cafe Mwanza sup­port local peo­ple know­ing emails and com­mu­ni­ca­tion , we plan start Radio and Tele­vi­sion basic of child and women human rights .

   We are ask part­ner­ship from your Orga­ni­za­tion,
   Thanks
   Rose­Mary Emmanuel pro­gramm maneger
   Direc­tor Tim­o­thy Timanywa

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