The Centre for Social Innovation is where I’ve spent the last few years, on and off as a freelance contractor and as an employee. I was responsible for most of their digital properties (especially where WordPress was concerned), including socialinnovation.org, climateventures.org, sicanada.org, and thecommonplatform.org.

The two biggest projects I worked was a re-design and revamp of their main site in 2020, and a push for accessibility compliance and updates across their digital properties in 2021.

For the website revamp, we outsourced the visual design to a local design agency, and I was the main point of contact for them and our team plus stakeholders. I was responsible for everything else, including research, design, testing, and development.

One of the main problems of the site was the architecture, and I led a series of workshops with staff including activities like creating proto-personas and card sorting exercises (physical and digital). As The Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) is a co-working space, I was also able to recruit and conduct user research with people who use our site.

Another problem we were trying to solve was ease of use for staff to update pages themselves, as the old template was hand coded. We went with a combination of Elementor for ease-of-use, and Advanced Custom Fields for more flexibility.

The project was a huge undertaking as the site has around 100 pages (not including blog posts, events and job postings), and needed connectivity with a new social network that we were launching. Despite those factors and some hiccups due to the pandemic, overall it was a successful project and the org was pleased with the result.

In 2021 I focused on improving accessibility on the site and other WordPress sites we owned. We worked with a 3rd party consultant who scanned and provided us suggestions for fixes. At the time of this writing, we were successful in being compliant with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA), but are still exploring ways to incorporate testing with real users who identify as having some sort of impairment.