Designing jenniferfaith.org
Jennifer Faith is a smart and courageous lady—mother of two teenage boys, experienced nurse, surfer, and…survivor of domestic abuse. After successfully finding her way to freedom from a 22 year marriage to her abusive Christian husband, she found that she had learned so much that she wanted to help other women, especially women of faith, to navigate this treacherous journey. She started writing—one full length book about her journey to freedom (as yet unpublished due to the controversial nature of the content) and two smaller books with essential information that can be read and digested easily. When she felt she was ready for a website, she did the research on her own, secured her domain name jenniferfaith.org and a hosting service, installed WordPress and picked a nice theme herself. However, she wasn’t sure how to install and configure her theme to establish the design of her site and needed additional features she didn’t know how to implement, so she called upon me to help her finish designing jenniferfaith.org and put on the final polish.
Because she’s a beautiful woman and a surfer, Jennifer had many lovely and uplifting pictures of herself against the backdrop of sunny southern California to give her site an inspiring look and feel while introducing her to those who need her help. This made the customization of her WordPress theme easy to accomplish. A local designer heard about her story and volunteered to create a logo for her, which looks great on its own, on Jennifer’s business cards, and in the context of her website.
Designing jenniferfaith.org included a complete plugin suite to provide analytics, security, image optimization, search engine optimization, social follow and sharing, and more. She wanted people struggling with abuse to be able to subscribe to her posts via email, so we added a Feedburner feed so she could track subscribers and analytics. We also syndicated her posts to her new Facebook page for the convenience of her followers and to save time for this busy professional nurse and mom. I streamlined her custom menu, edited the text on her About page for search engine optimization, added a Google translator so she could share with women struggling with abusive relationships around the world, and added Amazon links for her books.
In the end, Jennifer Faith’s website is not only attractive and appealing, but filled with her own original, uplifting content as well as announcements of personal appearances and radio show interviews. jenniferfaith.org has helped many women in Jennifer’s own area, along the West Coast and around the world, and has brought her many opportunities to speak publicly on this difficult and controversial subject. Many visitors to the site have even had the courage to leave comments, a touching testimonial to the effectiveness of her writing and its online presentation.
Here’s what Jennifer had to say when my work was complete:
“Dear Hannah,
You are amazing and the blog is so wonderful! I love it and we don’t need to change it at all. The theme is perfect. :)Thank you thank you thank you! Love you so much.
XOXO
Jennifer”
Later, she added: “You are very talented and God has really gifted you with intellect and artistic ability which is rare.” That means so much to me!
Below is an image of the jenniferfaith.org home page in its entirety. Since it uses a feature called parallax for the background image and the social sharing buttons stay fixed on the screen while a visitor scrolls down the page, you need to visit her site to see how it works live, but this will give you an idea of how attractive a writer’s website can be! If you have found yourself to be among the one of every three women who is experiencing domestic violence or spousal abuse in this world, please visit jenniferfaith.org and see for yourself the help she has to offer. She is one brave lady and has much to share that will help you gain confidence and courage yourself.
