web design

DIY Productions Website Mock-up

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Website design by corps member Melissa Niiya for Little Tokyo Service Center’s initiative DIY Productions.

DIY Productions Web Mock-up

Digital Media Asset Map

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Organization: 
Access Humboldt

An online, interactive map of Humboldt County digital media resources by corps member Sam Kaplan.

Visit the map here.

Graphic Designer

Organization: 
Mobile Film School
VISTA Name: 
Amy Simon
Program Start: 
7/2008
Project Description: 

Graphic and layout design for all MFS website, print and media materials to increase professional look and branding of MFS name.

- Liaison between MFS and AIR interactive web designers and developers to enhance the accessibility of our current website
- Propose and implement a new, more user-friendly design for the website
- Develop methods for increasing user-interaction with our website and online resources
- Research and develop affordable streaming videos technologies to implement on website
- Research and implement a more efficient transaction processing system for online donations
- Assist in the development, beta-testing, and implementation of a customized database and business management software
- Regularly update and maintain all content on website
- Monitor our online social networking participation
- Help improve and develop our internet presence

Project Outcome: 

Amy was the photographer and photo design editor for the Bowl-A-Roma fundraising event, the Bob Bullock Video project, and the Luling documentary workshop

Amy did the graphic layout and design for all business materials, workshops and events, including flyers, postcards, promo packets, program materials, business cards, manuals, proposals, signs, newsletters, and brochures.

Amy also did website design and development; she created page layouts and templates, icons, titles, drop down menus, picture galleries, and content.

Website Development

VISTA Name: 
Stephen Wills
Program Start: 
1/2007
Project Description: 

The overall goal of the VISTA is to build our capacity to sustain and grow our services to low-income teens and adults by expanding our regional web portal serving residents, organizations and business, and developing an on-line version of the Odd Jobs Squad program that helps youth advertise their odd job services.

- Expand and sustain new regional web portal by refining design, promoting the site to area residents and organizations, and soliciting sponsorship support from business
- Design, develop, launch and sustain an on-line site that enables youth and adults to sell and buy odd jobs services that is supported by organization and business sponsors.

DISKovery Computer Learning Center Development

VISTA Name: 
Daniel Sheen
Program Start: 
6/2001
Project Description: 

- Support the development of a volunteer team of computer trainers and technicians
- Coordinate our program website and design print materials as a function of outreach activities
- Help establish curriculum models and evaluative procedures for improved lesson delivery, effective instruction, and replication
- Develop an afterschool program for at-risk, high-school aged youth designed to train participants in high-level computer-based skills
- Support small minority business efforts by providing pro-bono web development services to local shops and restaurants

Program Development and Outreach

Organization: 
Appalshop
VISTA Name: 
Julia Taylor
Program Start: 
7/2008
Program End: 
7/2009
Project Description: 

Julia works in various capacities at Appalshop/Thousand Kites Project. She manages “StoryLine,” our online story-gathering project, for which she uploads audio to the content management system, and writes the copy for the website. She also responds to communication via our social networking sites and writes emailblasts. She works with community members (locally and nationally) to gather their stories about the criminal justice system and post them to the website. She also is currently creating a plan for a google map to document these stories using new technology. She also co-produces our campaigns. For our most recent campaign, Calls From Home, Julia coordinated the targeted outreach to radio station managers, prison chaplains, and prisoners and their families. She does the background research for the campaigns and organizes content. Including partnerships with other non-profits for viral marketing support. Julia works with community members (stakeholders) to identify community needs to inform future campaigns and communication strategies. Julia also produces our weekly radio show, Holler to the Hood, which broadcast online, as well supporting workshops that train community members and stake-holders in radio/online production.

Project Outcome: 

When Julia arrived at Appalshop, she spent the first couple of months working with staff to revamp the project’s website, making it media rich, clean, and efficient. We now have an direct model for people to call in their stories and a way to share them on the web. At the same time, Julia aided in the creation of a Facilition Guide, which helps Thousand Kites be a model for communities to take action. This document makes our work process more efficient because we can now direct people to the guide, instead of having to talk through all the details with each individual community. It is available in print and online and has greatly increased our capacity to train and garner participants. Julia has taken the lead on developing our database, updating contacts, and training staff on a system for long-term use. Overall Julia has worked at all levels of the organization to build our communication, online, and digital capacity.

Julia is able to identify key opportunities, and run with them. While looking through old email to learn more about the project’s correspondence, she found an unanswered email from a poet who was willing to volunteer his time to the project. Julia contacted him about possible connections, and now his network of poets has become a tremendous source of capacity in our project. His online community of writers has generated hundreds of audio samples for our website. Another example of this was when we received an email from a woman in the Virgin Islands who is dealing with the prisoners from her community being shipped up to prisons in our region. Julia saw this as an opportunity to really immerse in a community’s issue and help them find ways they could take action locally. The group has since produced their own radio program and hosted multiple film screenings using the Kites tools.

Impact Quote: 

Without our VISTA we would not have gotten several projects off the ground or reached the level of capacity that we have. Julia greatly expanded outreach and participation in our program by local, regional, and national communitiy members through building our communication backbone, developing a model for web-site content production, and building tools to lower the threshold of working with our program. It has simply impacted the entire organization to have someone focused on capacity building and research.

Marketing and Outreach

Organization: 
Community Partners
VISTA Name: 
Edward Gonzales
Program Start: 
7/2008
Program End: 
7/2009
Project Description: 

Edward has worked with members of the California Community Technology Policy Group (CCTPG) to engage underserved communities in discussion regarding the usage and impact of emerging technologies in their communities. Specific activities have included: Developing online tools to track data, policies, and reseach on technology access and use in low-income communities; Developing communications tools and systems to disseminate policy updates and action alerts; Disseminating the results of CCTPG research to community leaders for use in local negotiations on access to emerging technologies.

Project Outcome: 

- Edward has been key in revamping the communication strategies of CCTPG by helping develop the website and manage the Action Alerts and Newsletter communications to members.
- Edward has help in the research and production of Wired for Wireless? a report on Digital Inclusion and government-led wireless networks.
- Edward has developed new content for the CCTPG website – the content has addressed key issues related to community technology.
- Edward has been key in CCTPG’s outreach efforts by identifying new members and developing relationships with them.

CCTPG is a project within Community Partners. Community Partners has undergone a reassessment of the public relations and communications strategy. During this process, Edward has been key helping incorporate online tools to enhanse the public relations and communications strategy.

Marketing and UI Design

Organization: 
MicroMentor
VISTA Name: 
Mary Chant
Program Start: 
7/2008
Program End: 
7/2009
Project Description: 

Mary Chant has been working with us across three primary areas:

1) Marketing Strategy and Capacity Building: Mary’s primary duty has been to establish MicroMentor’s marketing operations from the ground up. She has produced an extensive Marketing Plan, helped us establish our core value proposition and messaging, identified mechanism for distributing our message and compelling participants to join MicroMentor, and she is setting up key systems and processes for planning, managing, and evaluating our marketing efforts. These systems include Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and Salesforce.com (including the integration of third-party applications such as AdWords for Salesforce, Vertical Response, and DreamTeam). She also leads our weekly Marketing Meeting and manages our Marketing Calendar.

2. Developing and Executing Marketing Campaigns: In addition to leading our marketing strategy and planning, Mary also leads the execution of this strategy. This primarily involves producing and rolling-out individual marketing campaigns, aligned with either specific events (e.g., National Mentoring Month, National Entrepreneurship Week, etc.), or a specific target population (e.g., women entrepreneurs, skilled business volunteers, etc.). Each campaign is multi-faceted, usually included a mix of web content development, Google Adwords, posts on relevant external sites (e.g., usaservice.org), outreach to relevant organizations (e.g., Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education/National Entrepreneurship Week), and social media outlets (e.g., Facebook, Digg, etc.). Mary also coordinates ad hoc marketing opportunities, ensuring that we are disseminating a consistent message across a variety of web sites and media outlets.

3. Product Development: Mary has lent her deep experience in usability and interaction design to our major web application development project: MicroMentor 2.0. She has advised MicroMentor management on best practice and has analyzed and made recommendation at key decision points during the process. She has helped us conduct usability testing and analyze the results. All of this has greatly enhanced our product development process and has substantially improved the quality and usability of MicroMentor 2.0, which we will be releasing in late March 2009.

Project Outcome: 

Mary has made many valuable contributions over the first half of her VISTA term. A few of her more major accomplishments during this period include: a) Developing a Marketing Plan: Mary surveyed our existing (and admittedly disorganized) market research, marketing materials, web content, etc. and performed research and analysis (including interviewing key staff and partners) to produce a comprehensive Marketing Plan, This plan includes market research, competitive analysis, positioning/branding, internet marketing strategies, offline/traditional advertising strategies, marketing goals, and evaluation mechanisms. The Marketing Plan is key piece of our strategic planning work, and has guided the development of our marketing efforts. b) Overhauling the MicroMentor Website: Mary gave the MicroMentor website a badly needed makeover, re-arranging the navigation and content to make key sections easier to find, changing the layout of our homepage to increase the conversation rate of first time visitors, and adding keywords to improve our search engine optimization (SEO), and adding content to improve our SEO and better support our participants. She has continued to improve the website throughout her tenure, and we will be migrating many of these changes to our new website when it launches in late March. c) Implementing Key Systems and Processes: Mary has set up key systems for the MicroMentor team, including Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Salesforce.com, and several Salesforce applications, such as Vertical Response, and DreamTeam (a project management application). She has also established a marketing campaign planning process and a website and marketing material change control process for us. These key systems and processes have greatly increased our program capacity and will remain in use long after the end of Mary’s VISTA term. d) Leading Usability Testing and Analysis for MicroMentor 2.0: Mary helped us significantly enhance the usability of our new mentoring platform–MicroMentor 2.0–by leading a user testing and analysis project. She provided usability training to our staff, planned our user testing process, oversaw the tests, reviewed the results, and made recommendations for modifications to our application design. This project was particularly challenging as we had to perform the tests and deliver the results in a very short timeframe, and Mary worked long hours and significant overtime to help us meet our goals.

The impact of Mary’s contributions is readily apparent in our quantitative and qualitative program feedback. First off, her marketing efforts have spurred tremendous growth in our program. Our participant enrollment during the first half of her VISTA period (7/1/08 - 12/31/08) jumped from 236 to 684, a 190% increase, compared to the same period a year ago. Additionally, when comparing the first half of Mary’s VISTA period to the same period a year ago, visits to the MicroMentor website have increased 180%, the average time spent on the site has increased 39%, and our bounce rate (the number of people visiting the site and immediately leaving) has decreased by 11%. All of this indicates that more people are learning about the MicroMentor program and that our website is more compelling and useful to visitors.

Program Development

VISTA Name: 
Naomi Jimenez
Program Start: 
1/2007
Program End: 
1/2008
Project Description: 

Naomi’s responsibilities were many and varied. At the beginning of the year, she assisted in the major redesign of our website, www.otxwest.org. Using tools such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and others, she added to visual elements as well as rewrote a significant amount of the content and reworked the navigation. Her technical duties consisted of helping to coordinate the installation of labs in schools and community centers. She worked with our network specialists to set up and occasionally maintain labs both in in schools and at community centers in various locations around Oakland. In addition, she often participated in our Tech Support Day, which is the day when recipients of our refurbished computers can come in and have their computers repaired or receive one-on-one instruction. She also assisted in the instruction of both our Take Home Computer Program, as well as four digital storytelling workshops, which varied in length from 2 days to four weeks. She would also occasionally supervise our volunteers.

Project Outcome: 

Naomi enhanced the existing curriculum for our Take Home Computer Program curriculum, adding about 10 additional pages to our training manual, which covers basic computer maintenance and internet safety. She also created various instructional handouts for our digital storytelling classes. She was directly responsible for an increase in the attendance of our Take Home Computer Program by at least 300 students, which is roughly one third more than last year. She also helped upwards of 270 students become confident in the use of multimedia software during our digital storytelling classes. She also increased her technology skills, both software and hardware. She went from having little to no experience using audio and image editing software, to being knowledgeable enough to teach others how to use them. She went from being slightly nervous speaking in front of a group, to being a commanding and effective presence in the classroom.

Although it isn’t particularly specific, Naomi’s digital story “California Dreaming” inspired many students to learn to use the multimedia programs. It never failed to get applause when we played it in class.

Marketing and Design

VISTA Name: 
Derek Maxwell
Program Start: 
1/2007
Program End: 
1/2008
Project Description: 

The VISTA member provided and assited with an array of services and programs, including direct training to youth participants, development of training manuals and materials, website design and development, community outreach and recruitment, development of program materials including brochures, posters, and mailers, as well as other administrative duties.

Project Outcome: 

Our VISTA member compiled a catalogue of past and present programs and descriptions, helped move our website to a new design based on open source Drupal software, helped set up web hosting with other non-profits, developed training manuals and materials, and taught a graphic design course to youth, which we had never done before here at PCTV.

Transmission Project