Victory at 24theweb.com

On 13 & 14 November, I took part in an amazing event called, rather curiously, 24theweb.  

The event consisted of 3 teams of seven volunteers building 3 websites for 3 charities.  In 24 hours.  Straight.  It was quite a buzz really, working with a team of professionals itself being a great experience and its own reward to someone who is used to working as somewhat of a solo operator.  My personal role was "wildcard", which is meant to slot in wherever needed, so I got spread around a bit.  The other roles consisted of project manager, IA/UX designer, HTML/CSS queen, developer, content writer and graphic designer.

We built a new site for Galway children's cancer charity CD's Helping Hands.  The site was built on Wordpress as it was agreed that Wordpress presented the easiest admin area for the non-technical end user, and the charity had nothing in the way of particularly esoteric requirements. The actual build was a lot of fun, from distilling the activities of the organisation down to its core to find out the actual messages that needed to be conveyed, to teasing out the expected audiences, to playing with branding elements and cartoon characters... and even animating them!

Wordpress once again went up in my estimation.  Although I missed the elegance of Drupal's Views and CCK, we managed to get the system to a lot more than a straight implementation of the core engine would normally allow!  And we did not hack core, so no evil was performed.  As added bonus, we set up Mailchimp for a newsletter, did up a newsletter template and even set up a facebook page for them, integrating both into the site.

In the end, all three charities were delighted.  And to top it all off, the judges judged our creation worthy of first prize, so naturally we're delighted!

I would definitely do it again - a brilliant experience, although I did question my sanity at 06:30 in the morning, desperately trying to catch an hour's rest and shivering... And all the volunteers got very well fed, which definitely makes it better!  Mmmm, cold pizza and coffee.