The chapter website's webmaster had been a chapter member who no longer wanted the duty of making monthly updates. The chapter had also wanted a newer look to be more enticing to younger people, as the chapter members are mainly older people.

Once I looked at the site and coding, I saw it would need a complete redesign. It was built with FrontPage editor, with inline styling and tables; definitely not up-to-date. They were a small non-profit with next to no budget for this project, but fortunately had a lot of time available. I worked on this in my spare time over a five-month period and was able to try out a number of ideas.

I began with some sketches and wireframes, going through a couple iterations. Neither of these proved appealing to the client, especially the first because it wasn't very polished. The second one with the owl didn't work, although it was visually very interesting: the reversed  text didn't work with the older members, and the design didn't lend itself to being responsive at all. Also, the chapter's mascot is a ptarmigan, so featuring an owl so prominently was not a good choice.

Since one of the goals was to make the site more appealing to younger people, and those people were increasingly likely to use a mobile device, the site had to been designed to be mobile-friendly if not mobile-first.

I finally landed on responsive design that worked well. No full page images of the wrong sorts of birds. A slider is on the homepage, promoting that month's club events, usually a speaker who comes to give a conservation-related presentation. Each month's featured event has a permanent page giving all the details. The newsletter page features a thumbnail of the current issue with a table of contents has links that opens up the PDF to that page, as well as a list of previous issues.

I continue to do monthly updates of the website September through May.