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 The site was both out-of-date and hard to update.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

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

Community colleges have more audiences than 4-year colleges: not just college students but students who will go on to 4-year colleges and students who won’t; people who want PowerPoint classes and yoga classes; businesses that want employee training; ESL students; people who want a high school diploma; etc. Working on the Cascadia website, we found this beautiful site we all wanted to emulate, for Santa Clara University, but it just wouldn’t have worked for us. The homepage does a great job of blasting messages at one particular audience — see the main area with the message and gorgeous photo (on the live site, both change every few seconds):

Santa Clara University homepage

Live page at:
www.scu.edu

The homepage provides all the categories of information that this audience needs — see the discreet little columns of links below the photo.

But you couldn’t use a layout like this to communicate with college students at the same time you were trying to reach business owners and people who want to learn ballroom dancing.

For an example of a homepage that targets multiple audiences, see Homepage design for Cascadia.edu.

Challenges: Produce effective company communication with customers, job seekers, regulators, and others, on topics that can be both sensitive and complex.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

Working with teams to define business goals and user tasks, I developed information architecture and wrote usable, persuasive website content for subsites on privacy, online security, corporate philanthropy, and careers.

On all subsites, content strategy required solving problems specific to the banking and finance industry. For example, privacy issues have unique implications in the context of online banking and tax software.

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

Employer: Intuit, Mountain View, California

Challenges: Design an intranet application to replace the paper form used for employee stock purchase plan signup and changes. Putting the functionality online changed the process for the staff processing the changes, as well as for employee users. Because an employee might incur financial risk by using the application, help text had to be carefully worded.

Dutchgirl’s solutions

I wrote user interface copy for several different user scenarios based on business requirements of the company’s stock plan. Here are the deliverables I produced:

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.

For more details

… 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:

For more details

… or to discuss your project, contact us.

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