Make it stand out
Indiana Phenology
What is Serve IT?
Serve IT seeks to apply the technology skills of undergraduate students to build capacity in the local nonprofit community to better serve their own missions.Serve IT offers students the opportunity to use credit hours to put the skills they are learning in school into action with real clients from the local nonprofit community. Students can return numerous semesters, building a portfolio and developing skills such as professional communications, client, project, and team management—all very difficult to teach in a traditional classroom.
The Web Team
Indiana Phenology has partnered with the Laurie Burns Clinic here in Bloomington to have team leads and interns collaborate on developing a new website for their organization. Our client, Indiana Phenology, has been working with us over the past few semesters to launch a significant and impactful project for the public.
This semester’s focus is on creating new species pages, with ongoing updates to be released as the weeks progress, allowing for continuous enhancements and transparency throughout the development process.
Meet the Team
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Ricky Vu
Team Lead
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Maddi Acton
Team Lead
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Jesse Colbert
Intern
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Abby Williams
Intern
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Sonja Crnevic
Team Lead
What did we do?
Throughout the fall semester, we teamed up with Indiana Phenology to create a website through WordPress. This has been an on-going process with the non-profit and at this part of the stage, we have finished the design process and moved on to implementing the wireframes to create what our client desired.
Our team met weekly to for 15 weeks to discuss what assignment needed to completed and met with our client bi-weekly in the time frame as well to check-in and ensure there was a smooth transition in creating a site that worked well for them.
The main focus was creating a base site where there would be a home page, about us, species page and a counties data page - four total.
Home Page
With different plugins in place, we were able to create what is seen on the left — the home page. It includes key elements such as a clear navigation bar, a carousel showcasing species with images, and external links to various resources from Indiana Phenology.
The page was primarily built by Maddi, my fellow team lead, who used the wireframes the previous team developed for our client last semester as her main reference and adapted them to fit our current requirements.
Species Page
Here the species page was created to home all of the different species that are grouped by category. With this being a pilot, our client entrusted with the woody species for plants within Indiana. This page acts as the main hub for all different species where users are able to click on each card to find out more information on each of the species.
My fellow team lead, Sonja was able to create this page where she implemented the filters to
Templates
Within the species pages that was created above, I created two templates that would be linked from each of the species. Our client liked the idea of having different data views throughout the process: one being a weekly view and another acting as an overarching portion.
These templates would later be used to populate the rest of the category that we were given as a sample to work with.
Overall
Taking everything into account, these were the main pages that were created throughout the semester with a couple others such as the about us and counties data pages that the interns created. It was an overall lengthy, but, rewarding process in the end. Wrapping up the semester, the Luddy School hosted a poster session where Serve IT students had the chance to present their work with potential employers getting a chance to view it.