“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 The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.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

Client: Galley Eco Capital, San Francisco

Challenges: Old site did not describe company’s current services; site lacked keywords that would support usability and search engine optimization.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

To help the company generate more leads in a rapidly growing and shifting market, I wrote and organized new website content. First, I interviewed principal and financing expert Lisa Galley, then provided these deliverables:

New homepage

Live page at:
galleyecocapital.com

www.amanda.com

Challenges: Develop a model for a portfolio of work by a user interface design firm.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

I provided architecture and content for one portfolio entry that served as a model implemented by AM+A. The model included a summary and basic details about each project and accommodated animated screenshots of key functionality.

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… or to discuss your project, contact us.

Challenges: Describe to people who have never used computers (or, in some cases, even a typewriter) some basic features of WebTV and the Web, and how to begin using them.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

Many WebTV subscribers were unaware of how they could use WebTV. To help new subscribers get started and to reduce subscriber churn, I wrote tips that subscribers received in a series of emails. The tips:

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… or to discuss your project, contact us.

Challenges: Present a complex line of educational products and services for K-12 students and teachers.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

I developed all content for Lightspan’s new site, including:

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In 1999 the Internet Archive asked me to develop a new site that would communicate the Archive’s mission for the public good and serve as a resource on privacy, copyright, and other complex legal issues.

Here are before-and-after links to archive.org (courtesy of the Archive’s own Wayback Machine):

Before: Archive.org in October 1999

After: In April 2000

Challenges: Convince potential customers in many industries of the business and technical benefits of the company’s graph visualization technology, which is is used to create visual representations of complex data.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

Tom Sawyer’s products were designed to be embedded in other software products that are used to store, manipulate, or generate such data. The products had applications in diverse industries: network management, software design, human resource management, criminology, and others.

The old website was heavy on descriptions of technical features, but the company needed to communicate with business decision makers as well as engineers. I reorganized and added to the content to target a wider audience, make the site more visually appealing and interactive, and provide more opportunities for site visitors to contact the company.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.