If you’re a student organization with a website, what matters more: posting announcements, or showing what you do? I think it’s the latter, but I also think it’s important for people to know what you’re up to. The previous iteration of the TechServ website was much better at keeping people informed of what we were up to… and that most events had already long past.
So, what does one do on a Saturday with an open calendar and 7ºF day outside? Play with WordPress themes apparently. The TechServ website was in bad need of a cleanup of old information, and the design was in need of an update too. After all, it was originally implemented as a temporary solution to a broken theme. Enter Customizr, a theme WordPress was featuring and one of extremely few that lived up to its advertising. It’s the first theme I’ve seen in eight years that honestly deserves to be featured – and that I would consider paying for.
It was exactly what I was looking for: simple, modern, responsive, and actually got our damn message across. In every previous iteration of the website, we always had a blurb shoved in a sidebar widget about what we did. Now, that’s the first thing you see (greatly helped by our first image slider. Ever.) Postings are still there, but they’re shortened to excerpts that may require scrolling down to see, depending on screen size. All in all, it took about two hours to roll out. Personally, I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I’m blown away at Customizr’s options. Time will of course tell if intentions correspond with actual user interactions, but I’m also confident that whoever maintains the site when I graduate from Drexel in June will have a much easier time doing so than if I replaced the site with one hard-coded from scratch, an alternative I was seriously considering.
To learn more about TechServ, please visit our website.
