The Community Foundation

While orchestrating a redesign of the Community Foundation's main website, dojo4 implemented a standalone microsite for the Community Foundation's annual "Trends" report, which provides "a common set of measurable data to help improve the quality of life in the community." The main Community Foundation site was being redesigned by Vermillion Design, and the Community Foundation asked dojo4 to distill design patterns from their desktop mockups into a fully responsive website that the Community Foundation could easily maintain. We started our work by building a static "placeholder" site to determine what pieces of content would need to be updated regularly and what bits were more permanent. Ultimately, this rendered the job of integrating the site's admin backend much, much quicker.

Initially, we weren't sure how the site would be updated: 1) using our favorite static site generator Middleman or 2) using our homegrown rails-based CMS. After discussing the options with The Community Foundation, we realized they would need a CMS so that non-technical editors and authors could update the site. Not long before finishing the frontend static site work, we caught wind of a new CMS tool called DatoCMS, "a fully customizable administrative area for static websites". Indeed, Stefano Verna, Dato's founder, reached out to us and explained how simple it was to integrate DatoCMS, and more importantly, how easy it was for non-technical to use it. It was perfect timing!

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