This past spring, in fact, we were hired to rebrand the newly renamed Association for Women in Architecture + Design (formed in 1948, they recently added the “+ Design” to “AWA” to better reflect the scope of their mission).

Part of the rebrand included giving their website a makeover. Not only did the look need to be updated to reflect the new identity, they also wanted a backend that was easier to maintain, as well as a blog that they could manage themselves. You can see the before and after screengrabs in this post, or check out the site here (note: the pages may load slowly—this is due to their host, not our code! The site ran quite speedily on a test host).

Executing the website was a walk in the park, if that park is Yosemite National Park and you are a double amputee with a bad sense of direction. I won’t bore you with the details like I bored myself with them in previous versions of this post, but I will share a short list of lessons learned along the way:

---

• Software marketing language is, unfortunately, not a programming language. “Easy and powerful integration with WordPress” does sound nice, though, doesn’t it?

---

• Internet Explorer 9 is by far the worst browser at rendering pages correctly, after Internet Explorers 8, 7 and 6.

---

• There are varying levels of ignorance and stupidity in web development. Find your level, and ask questions with the appropriate humility.

---

• Being the third person to work with a site’s undocumented code is difficult, but still better than being the fourth person (Sorry fourth person. I tried).

---

Challenges aside, AWA+D now has an online presence that’s easy to use and that they’re proud of. Insert rousing cheer here… or use the one we’ve inserted for you below. @scottfuse


The old AWA homepage



The old AWA homepage


The old AWA homepage


The old AWA homepage

The new AWA+D homepage


The new AWA+D homepage


The new AWA+D homepage


The new AWA+D homepage