Engagement
I first met Quincycles during the Lunar New Year Festival in 2024, held in Quincy, Massachusetts. They had a booth with a few flyers, pamphlets, and bicycling safety instructions, along with a giant foam core board with a map of Quincy. What was on this map, intrigued me the most. They provided pins for you to tag locations on the map, where you think bicycling lanes should be improved or added, and what route felt the most dangerous for cars, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.
I volunteered to add my o-PIN-ion (dad joke), and tag locations I felt were the worst and were in dire need of change.
After pining up my tags, I asked a member of the advocacy group how they got involved with the Lunar New Year Festival. Their table didn’t have anything written in Chinese or any other Asian ethnicities. They told me that they are trying to helping spread the word about bicycling safety, cycling infrastructure improvements in the city by engaging with the populous at cultural events.
The Data
The last known report of a traffic crash incident that involved a cyclist was back in 2023. An 86-year-old man of Asian descent died from a traffic injury. The community was shocked by yet another tragic loss. What’s more startling is that this isn’t the first time a cyclist who is Asian, has died from oncoming traffic.
This connected with me because, as an Asian American resident of Quincy, MA I wanted to know how the Asian community reacted to this incident and how they wish to voice their concerns. The last census data (2022) for Quincy, MA, 30% of the population is Asian.
My next question was, “Do you guys have a website?” They said they did, but when I went home to take a look at their website, it was vastly outdated! You can view their old website on the Wayback Machine. What’s worst was that it lacked a multilingual toggle to better serve the local Asian American community.
Oh no, this will not stand!
My Mission
While I was busy working during the summer and fall of 2024, I kept thinking about Quincycles and how the lack of a proper website would hinder the various communities within the city and their mission. I decided to reach out to Quincycles and offer them my services, and what I could do to improve their digital presence.
My first task was to assess their current website infrastructure. The WordPress version wasn’t too far off from 6.0, but the theme was old. Unused plugins needed to be deleted, overhaul of the website’s design, a better donation portal, and most importantly a translation option for the whole site.
I reached out to Steve, president of the organization, and shared with him my recommendations. Steve later spoke with his board members to have them weight in on what they felt needed to be improved before getting the okay for the project to start.
After a few weeks had passed, I drafted a proposal and gave them a copy of my Master Service Agreement document. A couple of weeks later, documents were signed and I was given the green light to begin the project!
Gathering Information
What needed to be done first was the infrastructure from the hosting side. The client had somehow tied two domains, a .com and .org, to GoDaddy, but was also paying for domain and web hosting at Ionos. They were paying more than they should for services they did not need.
For the domain, the free URL was originally obtained through GoDaddy and needed to be fully transferred over to Ionos. We would then have to end the payments for .com on GoDaddy.
Next, I connected with a few good folks from Pressidium who offered a bit of a discount for my client. This would further save the nonprofit a bit more money each month.
After the internal infrastructure was checked, I proceeded with exporting the database and the old website with WP Migrate DB Pro and ran a local instance with Local. This is the part where I got my hands dirty and inspected the plugins, assets, and content that made up the old website.
Although the client claimed they did not need any of the old content, I insisted that they needed to keep it in order to maintain previous links that would otherwise need to be redirected. Also, having valuable content on your site already would show that you’re actively engaged with the audience.
Starting From Scratch With Some Key Ingredients
Being a solopreneur means I need to manage multiple facets of the project at any given time. Two major roles make up the bulk of my work. One, being the designer and the other being the developer. Because I didn’t want to completely start from the ground up. I needed a base to prop up the work I was planning to do. Fortunately, a friend in the WordPress community, Emily Rapport, suggested I go with the Greyd Theme, as a boilerplate.
The Greyd Theme contained some nice prebuilt blocks and pattern elements out of the box. It also has a few additional styling controls that are not provided with plain WordPress. In addition, there are some accessibility guidelines baked into the theme that helps enforce proper rules.
Once the theme was selected, I needed to figure out what critical plugins were needed for the nonprofit organization. Since this is an advocacy group that targets the Asian population, a translation plugin was needed.
Initially, I offered Weglot as an option for the translation capabilities. But due to budget, we went with GTranslate. What sold me about this plugin is the unlimited translatable language options that I could activate on a single site. And this is on the free version!
The other plugin that I encouraged the nonprofit organization to adopt was GiveWP. Donation is a major component that allows a nonprofit to exist. You get funding from individual donors and other organizations either through a digital campaign or physical fundraising event.
When you drive traffic to your website, you need to make sure the donate button is as visible as possible. The next step is to retain the end-user and make them feel secure about giving donations. If you eject the end-user of your site to some other tab with some obscure widget, you may deter people from signing up or donating funds.
What I like about GiveWP is that they create a donation portal that stays on your website and it keeps the end-user engaged throughout the donation process. You can view your donation metrics/reports per donation form through WordPress’s admin dashboard interface.
Keep The Build Simple
This is an area that I know most designers struggle with. Having been a former designer, you can get stuck trying to figure out the proper UX design for a website. Designers block as some might call it. Luckily, the Greyd Theme has some pre built blocks and patterns for me to use. The major task was to retain the original content and get the the data up and running on the site.
Some minor custom patterns were created in order contain the existing data like dates, names, and titles of an article in a manner that reflected the based on there client’s requests.
There were also interactive Google Map routes that I felt they needed to keep as a nice history of their monthly rides. Sharing their community involvement from past events will help encourage future participation.
The new website was launched the day before Quincy’s Lunar New Year Festival (02-16-25). You can read more about Quincycles on their Facebook page.
Conclusion
I am honored to have had the opportunity to work with Quincycles on this website project journey. Helping to expand advocacy on better bicycling safety practices, change in bicycling policies, and to help out the Asian American community.
From a design and development perspective, I got to learn how to implementing proper WordPress site editor features, add responsive design, reinforce accessiblity features, and new plugin features for a better user experience.
If you are a nonprofit organization that wishes to work with me on revamping your digital media presence or to enhance the functionality, please feel free to contact me at any time!