tinhnguyenlonghoa.org launched!
tinhnguyenlonghoa.org has finally launched this past week.
It is my first work for a non-profit, and I am very proud to do my part and help out a friend. I’ve known Minh, the project director, for a while. We did a community service trip in Vietnam together more than 4 years ago, not too different from Long Hoa. Since then I’ve gained a lot of respect for him and his dedication to community service.
This site features a simple, minimal design with a focus on pictures as a way to tell the story. Here are some nice aspects of the site:
- Simple, minimal and responsive design.
- Responsive image sliders integrated with lightbox – I want the audience to be able to easily browse through the images – the main assets of the site – and at the same time look at them in more details.
- Integration with Facebook, including a Like box and Comments. The project’s Facebook page has been the main driver for social outreach, and it should continue leveraging that strength.
- Friendly content management backend, relying on the powerful WordPress admin, coupled with Advanced Custom Fields and other great plugins.
This is also my first site in Vietnamese, which imposes an interesting restriction on fonts. There are only 3 fonts from Google Web Fonts that fully support the Vietnamese characters. I lucked out as Open Sans, my favorite font, supports the Vietnamese language.
Working with Minh has been a very pleasant experience. He is always on top with his part of the project, providing content and images very early on. This allowed me to have a good grasp on the content and design to maximize their impact. He is also flexible in working with me in developing solutions for various ideas.
There are certain areas of the site that could be further optimized/ revisited for better performance and user experience. Hopefully these will be tackled on soon as the site gains more traffic and has more user testing.
This site is also the first to be hosted with pagodabox (wow! there are many firsts with this project!). I really like the object-oriented approach to hosting and the version control (git) built in from the start. However, I had to jump through a few hoops to get WordPress working correctly on there, such as configuring writable directories, syncing with local development (.htaccess for permalink) or WP Super Cache plugin – these warrant their own post.
Enjoy looking through the site (my apologies in advance for the cryptic and weird Google Translation – Google definitely needs to work on their translation machine for English – Vietnamese) and let me know if you have any suggestions/ comments.
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