El Centro De La Raza Site Redesign - Taproot Volunteer Project

The Taproot Foundation awards service grants to non-profit organizations in a number of areas. El Centro De La Raza, a Seattle non-profit, was awarded a grant for a 15 page basic website. The project team of Taproot volunteers consisted of six individuals, each of whom brought with them a specific area of expertise. Ben filled the role of Web Developer.

The team worked closely with several individuals at El Centro De La Raza, creating specifications and conducting interviews to determine how best to update both the design and architecture of the website.

Ben's main responsibilities on this project included advising on technical issues, determining technologies to use, and designing and writing the code architecture.

A "basic website" grant from Taproot does not allow for any server-side code, and one of the biggest challenges Ben encountered was finding ways to allow for easy content management of frequently updated information including news articles, blog posts, image banners, and quotations.

To create news and blog syndication, Ben took RSS feeds from both Delicious and Wordpress, two platforms El Centro was already familiar with, and parsed the XML to HTML via an intermediary site. This allowed the content to be styled and integrated with the site, while allowing updates to be made without having to re-push pages.

Ben also created several custom JavaScript systems for the El Centro employees to update the banners and quotes by replacing or adding simple strings without needing advanced knowledge of the underlying code used to serve the content.

HTML, CSS, JavaScript