Earlier this year, I started working with the West Bank Community Development Corporation on the website for a project called “Don’t Pass Us By.” If you live or work in the neighborhood, there will be some big changes coming with the Central Corridor light rail line; in particular, that big “trench” at Cedar and Washington where they’re building the new station is slated to be filled up with high-rises. This is inevitably going to bring change to the neighborhood, particularly for the Somali and Oromo communities who have established businesses along Cedar Avenue. For Don’t Pass Us By, I’ve been helping WBCDC’s Somali and Oromo outreach workers edit a series of YouTube videos about the project, as well as getting the site cleaned up with a new logo.

Once we launched the Don’t Pass site, there was the main WBCDC website to consider. It had been running for a few years, so there were quite a few pages, posts and documents, but the look was not customized. So, I applied Weaver‘s version of the Twenty Ten theme, and designed a type treatment for their logo, as seen at right. We also figured out that their hosting provider (who shall remain nameless) was charging a premium for a minimal amount of storage. (Debbie Wolking of WBCDC says, “I couldn’t believe we were paying more for one month of hosting than we now pay for an entire year to host two websites.”) So, another part of the project was to migrate the site to a fresh install on a new server. Finally, there was a weird mix of references within the site to an old test platform; those were also cleaned up.

As with any site, there’s still more to be done, but it’s been a pleasure to give both of these websites a makeover.