Redesigning Habitat for Humanity
I have volunteered to take over webmaster responsibilities for the Topeka Habitat for Humanity foundation. I’ve been wanting to do some volunteer work for the comunity for quite a while. My last idea was to host free workshops at the Topeka Public Library, introducing people to Ubuntu Linux, how to install it and use it. I must have e-mailed the wrong person because I never got a reply back. But I’ll do something like that eventually, library or no library. In the mean time, I’ll work on the above linked website.
One of my own goals with the redesign of this website is to maximize donation money to the organization. There are a lot of neat things that could be done to make that happen. I’ll be sitting down with a pencil and paper to come up with some design ideas soon, and probably look through some templates. And fortunately a lot of the material/content for the website is already there. Improvements could include separating the grouping of menu links into two separate sets, one set residing in a ever constant footer at the bottom of all pages. Every page needs some sort of “DONATE” button that stands out but isn’t offensive looking. If there are ever fund drives that take place, I’d like some kind of meter or chart that monitors total funds donated. It gives visitors something to watch as they help to make the total donation amounts grow.
I also would like to assist the build crews who actually put their time in to make these houses. There’s a lot of stuff around my house I need to have fixed, so I’ll see how much of this stuff I can learn…and whatever I can’t learn, I’ll know who to bribe for a good deal on carpeting. They call that “Networking.” Being as business is slow and I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands, I’ll probably be able to put in a lot of hours helping put a house up. And thanks to my lovely girlfriend, I have a nice camera to take pictures and video of the construction work, to be later added to the website and even Youtube.
Now…short of hosting a workshop, something I might propose is to see if we can offer people the ability to make donations, not just for sheet rock, carpet, tools, and all that goes into building an entire house, but why not also set aside a small category to donate towards a computer. A computer which I could build for…say…$300 or less new. Something close to that, probably. Heh, you can actually buy new Linux PC’s from Wal-Mart for that price right now, so it’s easily achievable. Or perhaps simply accept old computers as donations and refurbish them by installing a new OS and maybe spending a couple bucks on a RAM upgrade or something cheap like that. Then give the PCs to the new family/occupants of these community built houses. You might even be able to get Cox to donate a year of free high-speed Internet access, if they’re afforded sponsorship credit for it. Though this is just my idea; they might not go for it. We’ll see…
Anyway, I’ll be having some fun with this project and write updates about it as things progress.
Thursday, January 17th, 2008