What an experience. I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in last weekend’s 24theweb – a 24 hour challenge to design and build a website for charity.

My team ‘Team B’ was assigned the Myasthenia Gravis Association (MGA). Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is an auto-immune disease that weakens the muscles of the upper body, and the MGA wanted to reach out to sufferers and potential sufferers and also raise awareness of the disease.

So during the 24hours we took the site from this:

To this:

Here are some learnings from my sleepless night of web building.

The IA challenge – where does Ronnie go?

A fitting topic for the month of Movember, the biggest IA challenge we had was finding a logical location for a certain Ronnie.

Ronnie Whelan, the Irish football legend is the patron of the MGA -  Ronnie’s daughter suffers from MG and the personal story of such a well known figure gave the condition a great profile.

So we gave him front and centre priority on the homepage to trigger the recognition factor, and we also gave him his own page where you can read the full story of the Whelan family.

Converted to spreadsheets

I’ve never been too much of a fan of Excel. My regular PM always hounds us to update our project excel documents; he even has this cup:

However for 24theweb, a quick-decision environment where changes were being made constantly, Google docs saved the day.

We took on quite a challenge of creating a big site to hold the content, and
Google docs allowed me to quickly create a tracking document to review each page, each image and each element of content required – I’m a convert!

Too much of a good thing can kill you: what do we do with all this content?

The MGA rep, Karen Rynne Clancy was an amazing encyclopedia of information on MG. Karen runs the charity here in Ireland and came with so many resources, providing us with imagery, documents, patient personal stories and links to other sites.

As we progressed through the 24 hours we created a site that came in at 40+ pages. This was clearly a little ambitious in the timeframe that we had, and unfortunately proved to be our downfall as we didn’t quite make it over the finishing line.

However we’re tidying it up this week, and will be released to the world on www.mga-charity.ie. I’ll let you know once it’s ready to go.

A final thanks to the team

To Team B: Claire, James, Neil, Niall, Paul & Barry, I really enjoyed working with you and look forward to doing so again in the future. And a big thanks to everyone involved – this a really worthy event and one that is rumored to be running again, so keep an eye on 24theweb.com.