Fundação Fenômenos Website - Development Overview

Special thanks to Luiz Carlos Jr for the beautiful designs for the entire project!

Fundação Fenômenos is another non-profit which I had the great opportunity to work with during my time with the folks at Darwin. After the contract was signed with them, they notified us that they would be hosting an event which they needed the website up for immediately so that they could receive donations through it. While that was not discussed during the contract signing, we proceeded to develop a first draft of the site which included the essential information, and a portal through which donors could make donations.

Once the event was over, I continued the work and finalized the final draft of the website, however that was never deployed to production, as we never received the copy and images requested. Ultimately, the site that remains live is the first draft that was delivered for their event.

Approach

When Fundação Fenômenos reached out, they were requesting a new site because the copy on their current site was outdated, their donation system was no longer working, and they no longer had access to the developer that developed that website for them.

Upon hearing this, two things were very clear in our minds during the design process: 1) we need to use a CMS, so that the client can have the autonomy to change their website's copy at any time, without the need for developer intervention, and 2) Stripe will be our best friend in this project when it comes to receiving donations.

Due to the unplanned time constraints of the event, we were unable to develop a fully customized customer portal using Stripe's APIs. Instead, we opted to develop a simple donation portal (primarily for donor account creation) which ultimately redirected to a Stripe payment form. Not what we had envisioned for the full experience we hoped to deliver but, by all accounts, fulfilled its function quite successfully in collecting donations during and after the event.

When it came to the content of the site, we wanted to make sure every piece of text and every image could be edited. Strapi was our CMS of choice, as not only did it feel straightforward to implement, but it also felt like it would be very intuitive for non-developers to navigate. Every page, had its corresponding collection on the CMS in a perfect component to CMS field pairing to make everything as clear as possible to the client.

Looking back on this project does give me a feeling of false completion; while the structure that is currently there is not too far from the final draft that was never pushed to production, the custom donor portal was one of the central pieces which we had hoped to introduce and that unfortunately never got its chance to shine. I am however very proud of the site that we managed to develop and especially proud of having been able to deliver a project to the client's satisfaction despite the unexpected time constraints.