Woman’s Club of Wilmette Website
A devastating fire struck the Woman’s Club of Wilmette clubhouse in February, 2015. A landmark building also used for many
community events, the Woman’s Club vowed to rebuild and restore the
facility. A new website,
intended to be the basis of the building fundraiser, was initiated in
February, 2016 but the project stalled. In October, 2016 we were asked
to rescue the project. The site launched six weeks later.
When
we entered the project, the new site was being developed on the
WordPress platform using a WordPress theme. Although the major obstacle
to launching the site was the fundraising and membership commerce
components, our client wanted additional work done to enhance the site
design, layout as well as add new content.
The Strategy
Rescue
projects are often “fun houses” of discovering development errors,
non-standard practices and incorrect selection of functional tools
(plugins in WordPress parlance). Problems pop up where they are entirely
unanticipated. For this project we replaced the membership commerce
tool altogether, and re-configured the donation commerce tool. We also
added a calendar tool to minimize the need for constant calendar
updating and to provide a better look and feel.
Site Hosting
We
followed best practice by moving the entire site, as we inherited it,
into our own limited access “stage” development environment with full
intent to publish the production (public) website in the client’s
existing hosting environment. To do so required a hosting upgrade to a
secure site (https vs http) due to the new commerce functionality.
Alas, the existing host failed to be responsive and also sought to
impose a high fee for the service.
Our
effort to move to a new host was further complicated because the
client’s domain registrar was out of business and they had also
misplaced their domain registration access credentials. We worked with
the client to recover the access credentials and host the site with an
internet service provider that provided a free secure site upgrade and
also offered free hosting for non-profits.
Launch
Although
the unanticipated obstacles added out-of-scope costs to the project, in
the end the website was launched just slightly later than projected and
functions securely and without flaws