I worked with Sound Aging principal Barbara Green on not one, but two sites! The first, representing her social work practice, brought her website from 1998 into 2018 with a responsive WordPress site that allowed for her to enter and expire events and blog posts as needed without having to learn how to code. The second, AskDearie.com, is intended to provide advice to people with aging parents on how to deal with the transitions of old age.

Goals

To have an easily navigable site for clients and colleagues to learn about the geriatric social work practice while reading insights from Barbara on workshops and speaking engagements she regularly participates in.

Process

I worked with Barbara on a regular basis to help her set her content priorities while presenting her with multiple design ideas to reach the look and feel that she felt represented her personality and the clientele she wanted to attract. For the AskDearie site, we worked together to establish voice and tone on the advice she would provide, and how to present it in a way that would resonate with her audience while offering useful, necessary information.

Challenges

For the AskDearie site, making sure that the voices of Barbara as the clinician and her mother Dearie as the devil’s advocate going through these changes would be discernible but also fun.

Ensuring that Barbara could utilize the technology with as much ease and as little tinkering as possible.

Results

We launched two distinct but clearly related sites that have been used by a small test group up to this point, with an expectation that the AskDearie site will be much more used beginning in the fall of 2018. I provided Barbara with instructional documents and a social media strategy to spread the word.