I’ve written previously about how doing pro bono work is great training for web designers.
Your clients love you, you get to both practise and extend your skills and – if you’re like me – you get a warm feeling from helping those who could do with it.
And, sometimes, you get more.
Back in June 2007, I wrote about launching a simple web page covering a symposium on humane education held in Brisbane by the Oceania branch of Compassion In World Farming, an organisation dedicated to improving the treatment of domesticated animals in particular and all animals in general.
The symposium’s focus on education attracted support from my long time clients ACSSO, the Australian Council of State School Organisations.
Less than a year later, I was engaged to create a website for CIWF Australia, with funding and support from ACSSO and the UK head office of CIWF.
It also happened to be an interesting exercise.
CIWF has branches in various countries, each of which has some kind of web presence. Personally, I think the UK site is pretty good: nice layout, easy framework for adding new information, user friendly, actionable, and so on.
I suggested that the Australian site should pretty much clone the UK site, with a couple of significant changes, such as getting rid of the tables for page structure and making it semantic, valid, accessible and standards-compliant.
I think it worked.
The new site went live today.