“Cate transformed a traditional piece of sequential learning into a dynamic online experience.”

Client: Northern California Grantmakers, San Francisco

Challenges: Northern California Grantmakers was publishing an online toolkit of guidelines and checklists to help foundations prepare their facilities and grantmaking capabilities in case of a major emergency. NCG’s staff had compiled useful content, but the content needed adjustment to meet basic guidelines for website usability.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

To make the toolkit “web ready,” I provided these deliverables:

I also provided content guidelines to help NCG produce more consistent, user friendly, and searchable content while keeping budgets for future website updates to a minimum.

New homepage for toolkit

Live page:
NCG disaster preparedness toolkit

“Thank you for all you have done during this project! Your knowledge and skills, your patience and persistence, your continual search for information about effective sites, and on and on… We’ve learned a lot from you and have appreciated your commitment to quality.” —Linda Hendrickson, Cascadia Community College

Client: Cascadia Community College is a feeder school for the University of Washington. It shares its state-of-the-art, wetland-lined campus with UW Bothell. The magazine Washington Monthly named Cascadia the No. 2 community college in the United States.

Challenges: Cascadia’s old website got little traffic because users found it hard to find what they needed, even if the information did exist on the site. The site did not communicate the college’s strengths or provide much information that prospective college students commonly look for. The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

To plan and create Cascadia’s new website, I worked with Cascadia’s marketing and communications department and dozens of members of college staff and administration, providing these deliverables:

I worked with Lisa Galley to decide what keywords to include in page titles and navigation on the redesigned Galley Eco Capital website. Here’s an example of those keywords at work in the outside world:

Lisa’s post of May 20, 2009 , on her blog Our Green Journey, links to a post on sustainability as investment at One Block Off the Grid (1BOG).

On the 1BOG post, look for the phrase “commitment to sustainability,” which we identified as a keyword phrase during the redesign of the Galley Eco Capital site. The 1BOG post links that keyword phrase back to a page on Galley Eco Capital site titled — what else — Our Commitment to Sustainability .

This keyword loop increases traffic to Galley Eco Capital’s site, improves search results, and enhances the site’s usability (by reinforcing phrases that are relevant to the site’s audience).

» More about website strategy for Galley Eco Capital

Challenges: Optimize webpages for content usability and search.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

I edited content on Cisco.com for clarity, Cisco style, length, and usability. On selected pages, I also incorporated designated keywords to optimize for search. Topics included various networking products, Cisco services, and programs for Cisco partners.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.