NorCal Odyssey of the Mind

Problem

Northern California (NorCal) Odyssey of the Mind’s website had evolved along with its program, but was out growing their current WordPress website. Their website had been running on an older Child WordPress them since 2018, but needed a major update to the theme design to create more excitement for the program and attract more families and young participants.

Besides a new look and feel, the core processes had to be upgraded with more current programing and workflows for making the membership payments, adding events, managing volunteer positions and program area information easier to keep up to date. At the same time bring up resources to the most current technologies and capabilities. We also found through our Scoping Audit that several plugins were either not needed or need to be replaced.

Solution

Shaw Web Designs worked with a talented graphic designer, volunteering with the NorCal organization, who designed a new fresh and fun look for NorCal’s program that encourages young people worldwide to embrace their creativity and develop divergent thinking skills.

Great thought was put into trimming down, organize and simplify hundreds of pages of information that had been developed during the 5 years since their last website redesign. The design allowed for better communication with different participants from students, coaches, parents and administrators.

Shaw Web Designs took the designs created by the graphic designer and brought them to life. Using the latest best practices, we created a custom WordPress block-based theme, custom templates using Full Site Editor. We imported all content that would be reused and stripped all unnecessary HTML and CSS to start with clean content that would adapt to the new WordPress theme. We exported and imported all Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies and Custom Fields.

Custom portals and workflows for their automated scholarship applications were reviewed and rebuilt with updated code and streamlined. At the same time, new processes were developed to simplify membership communication.

Some plugins were replaced with more modern or efficient plugins, such as with the plugin used for their events. Shaw Web designs found that the old events plugin was not as robust as it could be and used one that we have found to be stable and with excellent features. In addition, the plugin allows for future growth with functionality, if the organization needs it.

NorCal Odyssey of the Mind’s new website will be able to support their future growth for several years to come, because we took the time to developed their WordPress website using current commercially acceptable standards and technologies.