SevenPonds

SevenPonds brought me in partway through the project to serve as a WordPress, design, and UX consultant. They already had the majority of the mockups created and a solid dev team making magic out of WordPress to house an incredible amount of content. But the mockups were static PDFs, which meant the devs were doing their best to eyeball the designs and translate static, editorial layouts into something that could work dynamically with best practices on the web. And it wasn’t coming out quite right.

The next few months were an arduous process. A lot of love went into every section, color, font selection, and bit of spacing of the site. We started by pausing dev work. I conducted an audit of the site in its current state, comparing the mockups against the existing site design and connecting with the founder along the way to make sure we covered every detail. This even involved using Inspector to show CSS tweaks in real time to make sure the results of the audit could be translated into “dev speak” and moved into actionable tickets in Monday.

For example, in the mockups we often had cards displaying information that were all the same height. Beautiful! And super easy to work with in an editorial/static/InDesign environment. But once you add dynamic content with long and short titles, your tile heights start to vary. This is best practice on the web. It means you’re being responsive. But it was not the look we were going for. So we came up with a compromise: character counts and hard limits where the words on the cards would automatically truncate to keep the height consistent.

There were dozens of instances like this, where editorial layouts had to be adapted into web layouts. And in this sense, I essentially served as the technical project manager, the liaison between the founder, the designs, and the dev team. Finding ways to make static layouts plausible online.

Turning a WordPress into a Product

Once dev kicked back into gear, we started looking into the UX of the site. One of the big updates between the new site and the old one was a member portal for end of life professionals and the public to share events and list or find venues and services, very similar to The Knot.

And because the bulk of the website is information and magazine-style articles, the site was built in WordPress. This is one of those cases where a prebuilt CMS with powerful SEO capabilities already baked in made a lot of sense. However, this also meant the site was appended with various plugins to achieve the desired membership functionality.

The next few months were comprised of a lot of meetings, going through and seeing how the different plugins, BuddyPress and The Events Calendar being two of the biggest, could be turned into the portal we needed. This aspect of the site had no mockups, so I handled a lot of meetings with the founder and the lead dev to understand what was possible, what was desired for the product, and then again merging the vision and reality together to make something easy for the main demographic of the site, Gen X and Boomers, to use.

This was naturally followed by a lot of testing and a lot of refinement.

Ultimately, we created two distinct portals for professionals and the public, a clean dashboard with quick links for both, a modal that opens over the My Account button to make navigation easy no matter where you are on the site, and we spent a lot of time perfecting the forms to add events or your venue and service. Plus the feedback users received so they never end up “boxed in a corner.” They always know where to go and what to do next. And we rounded it all out with a help desk, knowing our main demographic may need a little extra help along the way.

The Cherries on Top 

There were also several miscellaneous tasks that popped up. I helped support the marketing side by creating eleven unique landing pages in Mailchimp so people can download various resources in exchange for joining the mailing list. A lot of love went into making sure those pages matched the visual branding and, more importantly, the voice of SevenPonds.

(Side note: I tested the Mailchimp AI builder early on in this process and it created a welcome email with colorful balloons. Totally inappropriate for the topic, totally off brand. A lot of things still need a human touch, friends.)

We also added a plugin to show related articles. Sometimes they didn’t have featured images, so I created a little fallback image with a dragonfly and wrote some code to make sure the related articles always looked good.

Other miscellaneous tasks included redesigning the team’s email signatures and adjusting the dragonfly GIF in the footer to match ADA accessibility standards.

And while that barely scratches the surface of the work completed, it does bring us to the site being published. It was truly an honor to be a part of this project. I love working with businesses that have a positive impact on the world, and SevenPonds fills an important space with kindness and care.