'The Home in Lodz' Foundation
A website for Foundation "Home in Łódź" came into being as a volunteer project. The realization was preceded with team discussion to establish crucial elements – what should be displayed at the foreground and which elements to move down in the structure of the page. The project is of sentimental value to us, since it is one of our first realizations. However, due to its mission and project type we decided to introduce it.
About the foundation
A Children’s Home for Disabled Children of ["The Home in Łódź" Foundation](http://www.domwlodzi.org provides secure and stable settings for children suffering from chronic diseases; it allows them to experience healthy growth and development in a family-based, warm environment. The foundation’s key initiative so far has been creating a children’s home for seriously ill children or children abandoned by their biological parents. The home was established in June 2007.
Key features of the website
- design resembling a children’s bedroom decor – joyful, colorful and matching the then fairytale-style logo
- a slider with crucial information
- 2 language versions
- dotpay.pl payment module integration
- latest news module
- pages and modules connected with 1% tax donation
- Facebook and YouTube extensions (automatic content update)
- AdWords campaign
- basic SEO panel
- admin panel
- a gifts/essentials reservation module
- old site data import
Implementation
For our CMS system we chose Wordpress mainly because most of our teammates had already had contact with the system, which made website updates available to all the employees. The former version of the site was created in a home-made CMS system, making the latest news update quite simple, which, however, was the only simple thing about it. The site was very difficult to update (or even impossible to update with growing number of posts). We started the implementation with writing an exporter that extracted old data records in order to import them into Wordpress. It was not seamless, since the post structure in Wordpress is unique, however, we finally we managed to finish the task. For the template core we used the then popular framework Gantry and developed styling in accordance with the specified project. Then we implemented the designed modules, adding gift reservation and payment modules as well as English language version with time.
For the time being the site has several thousand visits per month and is placed among top ten in Google search for many phrases connected with the Foundation.