The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust’s candle tributes website is one of the more interesting, worthwhile and challenging web projects I’ve worked on.
The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust, an organisation that I’ve worked with on and off for the last eight years, commissioned me to design a new mini-website. The site gives women (and their partners) who have lost a child to an ectopic pregnancy, opportunity to light a candle and leave a message in remembrance.
Remembrance is such an important service to be able to offer and the Trust wanted to get this just right, so there was a lot of discussion and many minor changes made along the way. It’s a difficult area to work in because it deals with grief and so many other emotions. The site had to be carefully worded and the colours and imagery well-chosen. It was also important to reflect the branding of the organisation and encourage clients to make a donation to support the work of the Trust.
What tech was used?
I didn’t implement a CMS because I couldn’t find a product to do what we specifically needed. Instead I coded from scratch in PHP and MySQL. Every modification meant a new round of testing; fortunately the Trust has many active supporters who were happy to sign up as guinea pigs- and their help was invaluable in spotting bugs and creating a user-friendly application.
Looking back, would I do anything differently? Maybe, having explored the Drupal CMS lately and seeing how flexible it can be, I would have used it as the tool to enable people to subscribe and light candles.
Using Basecamp to manage the project was a good idea
Izzie at the Trust is a great project champion, she had a vision and convinced her organisation to fund it. She’s also a funny and frequent communicator. Because so much discussion was necessary, we used a great product called Basecamp to manage the project: Basecamp enabled me to uploaded the draft designs as JPGs and Izzie could comment on them; we made to-do lists and ticked them off as they were completed; Izzie uploaded text content so I could add it to pages; and now we have an archive of all the decision-making throughout the lifetime of the project.
If you’re going to use an online project management like Basecamp, here’s one tip: stop sending each other emails and do everything using Basecamp instead. If you want, Basecamp can email you every time a document or comment is added and it’s so much more convenient than searching through old emails trying to find an attachment.
The candle tributes
The site has been live for several months. Here are just two of the messages left on the website:
to our beloved who never made it….will never
forget the minute you made us smile.
Wanted in every way possible ,you fought so hard
but it wasn’t to be. Gone but never ever
forgotten.You are always in our hearts and we
think about you every day.xx
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