Website Weekend LA 2016

Pixel Jar’s own Jeff Zinn recently had the opportunity to participate in Website Weekend LA. Website Weekend LA is a great event where nonprofits and organizations pair up with teams of volunteer digital professionals. Together they build amazing websites and digital tools to improve their respective organizations.

What is WebSite Weekend LA?

This year, 120 volunteers came together to build 16 websites over the course of a weekend. This wasn’t the first Website Weekend LA however. The project is the brain-child of Natalie MacLees who is a dynamic member of the Southern California WordPress Community. The first weekend was in 2013. From the inception, local professionals  jumped onboard to give back to organizations that needed a boost to their web presence. This year Natalie had some help organizing the event from the affable, Alex Vasquez who runs a boutique digital marketing agency called DigiSavvy and is another hero of the WordPress Community in Southern California. We at Pixel Jar fully embrace the goals of the event and actively look for opportunities to support our local WordPress community.

Jeff worked on a team tasked with helping a local performing arts school simplify the management of their website. The team also worked with the agency to help them think about the voice and visibility of the website. Jeff said, “It was a fun case where each question spawned a great discussion and then more questions”. Jeff enjoys these kinds of hack-a-thon weekends because it gives him a chance to work with folks from the community. He’s known several of them for years, but never had an opportunity to collaborate with them.

Website Weekend is a fantastic opportunity for nonprofits to consult with digital professionals to build websites of substance. The goal is to build the site to be easy to maintain and update. Additionally, training is provided to the representatives of the nonprofit at the same event. The volunteers get to use their skills to help a worthy organization reach their audience. They also get to collaborate with other digital professionals and make new contacts through the event.