Formerly the Arlington Academy of Hope
The Reach for Uganda is the Design TLC Pro Bono Client for 2019-2020.
About Reach for Uganda
After winning a State Department diversity lottery visa, Joyce and John Wanda moved from Uganda to the U.S. in June, 1995, and settled in Arlington, VA. Witnessing the impressive learning experiences of their children in Arlington Public Schools, John and Joyce were inspired to provide a similar education for children in their native villages. Less than 1% of Ugandans graduate from a university, as John and Joyce had, and they both knew how rocky and pot-holed the road to such success was. In 1999, they began to smooth that road by providing tuition support to five village children and recruited other supporters from their church and workplace. Over time their program has evolved into a vibrant school, with over 300 students and nearly 150 on a waiting list.
Website Review and Refresh Process
Design TLC is excited to help support this important program by providing pro bono website maintenance, enhancements and consulting for 2019-20.
We started with a full review and audit of the existing website. We moved the site to faster hosting on Kinsta, who offers a nonprofit discount. We removed a lot of bloated code and unnecessary plugins. For our rebuilt site, we maintained consistency with what worked on the old site. Enhancements and improvements included:
- Creating a more compelling headline and call to action in the “Hero” area. We added the description below, instead of on top of the photo. We tidied up the content on the home page so that the upcoming event will be featured automatically.
Old Website Home Page:
New and Improved Website Home Page:
New home page features a compelling headline and call to action.
- We cleaned up the sub page design so the page title now features at the top, with the content flowing better beneath it. We optimized images that were way too large on the server to make the pages load faster. We also organized content into “accordion” displays to make the content easier to view and “open” at a glance.
- We installed GiveWP software which will allow AAH to collect donations on the website without paying an extra fee to Donor Perfect. Thank you to GiveWP for their generosity in donating a one year license for the TLC from the Heart project. We will configure this as part of Phase 2 of the project.
- We created and configured Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and submitted the website sitemap to the Search Console. As part of Phase 2, we will help AAH with some SEO optimization.
Learn more about our pro bono program, TLC from The Heart.