After more than 20 years doing career coaching and recruiting for a larger firm, Ed Rogan decided to set out on his own. I worked with Ed to get an understanding of how he wanted to present himself to his potential clients, the types of content he would be creating, developed the base copy, and then built a site for him in WordPress. The site deliverable included instructional documentation on how he could add, edit, and delete listings and notes of congratulations to all of his new hires.
Design
This small nonprofit organization has an important mission: it helps published authors experiencing medical emergencies to get through their financial difficulties. I worked with the board of directors to design both a front-end site for people to learn about the organization and set up the visual structure for a password-protected administrative section on the back end. This system allows for the authors to securely request funding online and for the board to discuss each case and have it documented in the request. I worked with an outside developer to build the site using the Drupal platform.
For more than three years I have been sharing my knowledge with others by teaching workshops for General Assembly, an adult education organization that teaches people how to break into the tech world. I have done courses on business writing called “Stop Writing Crap!” as well as introductions to Adobe InDesign and WordPress that have resulted in return visitors and even new clients!
As Co-founder of this startup in virtual reality and education, the journey of this organization was far more than building a user experience architecture or developing a content strategy for a client. I took part in every decision made to move us forward as we developed this market-making company.
Goals
To envision and build an education technology studio-lab where students would create and share immersive stories and games from inside a Virtual World by means of motion capture technologies and 3D tracking systems.
Process
Working with my co-founder to implement the vision, we acquired both human and financial resources to allow us to build a platform and hold workshops with students to test our assumptions and our methodology, get feedback, then iterate on what we learned.
Challenges
Finances were our biggest challenge—and ultimately the catalyst for our demise. We were self-funded for most of the life of the company, though we did successfully complete a Kickstarter campaign to help us develop some of our story-games based on workshops that our student groups completed.
Results
While we made the difficult decision to wind down operations in late 2018, we received accolades from other virtual reality companies for our innovation and had a working prototype that we made available as an open-source virtual reality world.
RealityNext\’s International Cloud Learning Sessions
RealityNext\’s Story-Game making workshops with middle and high school students
Check out one of our completed curricula. This one was based on Newton\’s First Law of Physics.
How does one turn more than 12 years of work into a single page of a portfolio? As a journalist and leader of an award-winning community media company, I wrote hundreds of news articles, informational pieces, and strategic documents. As CEO of this organization, I oversaw multiple publications and products that informed, educated and excited thousands of readers while overseeing success of the business. Here’s a nutshell of the work I did:
- I targeted overall voice and editorial strategy toward niche demographic.
- I led advertising and marketing initiatives that my team carried out.
- I collaborated with my executive board, journalists, designers, our sales team, and other stakeholders to deliver our publications week in and week out.
- I used analytics and audience feedback to continually assess and improve content quality.
- I served as the voice of the organization by meeting regularly with community leaders, audience, and company ownership.
- I established content marketing plans that generated increase in ad revenue and client satisfaction.
- I envisioned, developed and launched a niche news and information site for young adults that served as a community builder while garnering accolades for its innovation and creativity.
- I took pride in mentoring upcoming journalists as they launched their careers.
- I delivered our product on time, 100% of the time, in a fast-paced environment under tight deadlines.
Download articles as they appeared in print from Joel\’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief.
This slideshow gives an anatomy of how I transformed the web presence of the organization
Goals
- Build online museum to house the Washington State Jewish Historical Society’s hundreds of stories and artifacts to make them publicly available.
- Understand audience.
- Establish content types.
- Find proper software applications to satisfy needs.
Process
- Validated existing assumptions through user research and potential audience survey (received 220 responses).
- Worked with stakeholders to assess society and audience needs, how those needs would benefit their audience, then constructed engagement strategy.
- Developed personas, information architecture, and user experience architecture.
Challenges
- Small budget.
- Tying together multiple web systems.
- Security and privacy.
Solution
- Transformative WordPress site changed how the Washington State Jewish Historical Society tells its stories and interacts with the public.
- Secondary museum-grade site with batch upload feature for housing digital artifacts.
I researched, designed and built site as a consultant for the Washington State Jewish Historical Society. You can download a version of the Content Strategy I created for sustaining the site here. In addition, as part of this project, I created fifty exhibit boards for the WSJHS\’s fundraising event with content that would eventually become a part of the museum. This is one of the many boards where I interviewed the subject and wrote the copy for the display.
Goals
Implement a site redesign that streamlines current content from 48 pages and targeting successfully allows for scout recruitment and multiple stakeholders.
Process
- Content audit, including dozens of PDF attachments, to reduce and reconfigure overall content.
- User research interviews with scout leaders, parents, and national committee members allowed for confirmation of site priorities.
- New information architecture put most commonly used items top and center.
Challenges
- Leadership committee not always aligned on needs and desires.
- Discerning between necessary, relevant and disposable content.
- How to keep the site content dynamic.
Results
New site has a clean look with easy-to find content and simplified navigation that will include events calendar and more photo content. Launch expected early December.
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.