NWPVA WEBSITE
Northwest Paralyzed Veterans of America is a nonprofit organization that serves catastrophically disabled American Veterans with spinal cord injury or disease. Their primary function is to advocate for these veterans at the local, state and federal levels of government.
The organization requested a redesign of their previous website. The final deliverable consisted of a complete upgrade of the structure, layout, style, color scheme, navigation, and informative content. Additions include a unique header, photo gallery, many internal and external links, a dynamically linked calendar, resource pages and many other features.
The website is fully responsive to all screen sizes and devoted to primarily static information about the Chapter, although the Home page contains an Announcements section, and the Calendar page lists upcoming events. It was meticulously built from the ground up, using hand-coded HTML5/CSS3, and a small amount of JavaScript/jQuery and PHP script. It employs a structured, hierarchical directory containing separate folders for CSS, images, PDFs, PHP, JS, etc. The page layout is sectioned with div tags (no tables) and properly organized with a head, header, body and footer. Most of the script is at the bottom of the page, below the footer section.
The web design is focused on accessibility and consistency, with large, concise and easy to read text, current and relevant information, good contrast (visibility), a large and prominent navigation menu, a distinct header, sectional layout and footer on every page, a right sidebar (on most pages) with related resource links, carefully balanced redundancy, high quality images, and a very large quantity of well-functioning internal/external links.
The site was intentionally built with hand-coded HTML, rather than a CMS, to attain the cleanest and most efficient performance by reducing the extra load on the database. Blogs are more dynamic, requiring larger data storage and retrieval than comparatively more static websites. A separate, linked blog site was produced for this purpose, rather than bog down the website with unnecessary code.
The current website is fast, clean, current, relevant, unique, accessible, responsive, and high performing. It can be viewed at http://nwpva.org.