Olancho Aid Foundation

While I was in Honduras I volunteered my time and skills to the Olancho Aid Foundation, a non-profit organization that manages several educational institutions in Olancho, a rural department in central Honduras. When I arrived they already had a website -- black text on a white background, incomplete pages, broken links, and a crude volunteer application form that emailed the submissions to a Hotmail account! They needed something new that could make the right first impression for people looking to donate to, or volunteer as teachers for, the Foundation. More details after the first screenshot.

I began with a "redesign" (technically they didn't have a design before!) that was professional but not overly stuffy or formal. Once my visual design was approved, I started built a new website on a LAMP (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) framework and implemented a rudimentary templating system that allows for basic editing of any page on the website using a text editor and adds bilingual (English/Spanish) support across the entire website.

In addition to static pages, the website features several integrated web applications: a "contact us" form, a news page, an events listing, Paypal integration for donations, and an application form for volunteer teachers.

Their volunteer application form is the most important feature of the website, since Olancho Aid relies heavily on volunteers who come to Honduras. Their original online form duplicated an old paper form they had, question for question.

I rearranged the questions and simplified the overall application process. It's still a pretty long form, but the legibility of the form has been greatly improved, based on anecdotal evidence of a volunteer I met who had the "pleasure" of filling out the previous online form. Submissions via this form are now recorded in a MySQL database.

I also created a simple multi-user administrative backend to allow the Olancho Aid staff access to the underlying MySQL database to maintain their news and events and review their submissions through the "contact us" and volunteer application forms.

I'm very pleased with how the website turned out -- particularly because Olancho Aid themselves are also quite pleased. I met several volunteers who applied online and then arrived in Honduras who told me that the website gave them a good impression of Olancho Aid and made them feel comfortable in their decision to come to work in Honduras. Since the website launched, volunteer enrolment has increased dramatically, thereby improving the quality of Olancho Aid's work.