Living Our Values: What’s New at Digital Ink
by Jason Unger, Founder
Insights / Digital Ink /
Can you believe summer is just about over?
Kids are headed back to school. Vacation auto-responders are turning off. And with Labor Day around the corner, everyone’s about to realize there’s only a few months left in 2024.
At Digital Ink, 2024 has been about living our values of thoughtfulness, reliability, and creative problem-solving.
Big Impact, Focused Efforts
In 2023 – we went big. We were blessed to be presented with so many opportunities to help mission-driven organizations grow their digital presence, either with a new brand website, a campaign-driven microsite, or interactive story to be told. With nearly double the number of projects we’d taken on in previous years, it was quite a journey – and we built some awesome tools for our clients.
Coming into 2024, we intentionally decided to take a step back and limit the number of new projects we’d take on, and look at everything through the lens of our values.
Sometimes that meant turning down an opportunity to work with an organization that we’d previously be excited to partner with. Sometimes that meant telling an organization that they didn’t really need a website redesign, but should focus their attention elsewhere.
With this approach, we’ve been able to focus on our existing website management partners more intently, and able to spend more time working on the handful of larger projects on our plates.
Here’s a peek at what we’ve launched so far in 2024.
Website Redesigns: OneCause, Maryland Hospital Association, VisArts
Our long-time partners at OneCause were ready to take the next step in their journey, redesigning their website with us after we partnered together on the previous edition launched in 2018.
Their goals with this new evolution were to modernize their site’s overall look-and-feel, add more interactive elements, rework their navigation, and provide better ways to drive traffic to their resource library of blogs, webinars, ebooks, and more.
The OneCause website has always been a work-horse: it delivers sales leads, provides fundraising tips, and connects a network of partners with nonprofits. The new site continues to be flexible, easy-to-manage, and goal-driven – while passing performance tests from GTMetrix with flying colors.
Launching the new site was done through the lens of our value of reliability; when you redesign a large-scale site, it often requires the tenacity to handle finding an additional page or additional content that needs to be updated, and in this site, we succeeded.
We welcomed a new partner late in 2023: the Maryland Hospital Association (MHA), comprised of the state’s community, teaching, and specialty hospitals and health systems.
MHA came to us looking for a new website that would be both visually appealing and be built on a platform allowing them flexibility and the ability to easily manage their site. Their old platform offered very little in the way of building visually-interesting pages but was able to handle their large membership needing access to password-protected content.
Designing and building their new site required us to lean on our value of creative problem-solving, as we pushed WordPress to work exactly as MHA needed for their members and their key stakeholders.
Our most recent launch is the new website for VisArts, a hub for artistic exploration and social impact. Offering camps, classes, private events, gallery showings, and more, the new VisArts website has been greatly anticipated.
The new website was designed and built using our value of thoughtfulness; as we progressed through the project, we realized that our initial plan for launching their new site wouldn’t work as intended. Their existing website, which handled everything from their packed schedule of events to their tens of thousands of users to their daily e-commerce transactions, would need to updated page-by-page to ensure existing functionality remained while the new design was implemented.
With a website crucial to both the organization and its community, everything needed to work as smoothly as possible – while ensuring the site’s design reflected the creative spirit of VisArts.
The year’s not over yet, though – and not surprisingly, there’s still more good stuff to come.
Hope you’ve had a wonderful summer, and remember – your story is still being written.
About Jason Unger
Jason Unger is the Founder of Digital Ink. He built his first website on Geocities, and hasn't looked back since. Digital Ink tells stories for forward-thinking businesses, mission-driven organizations, and marketing and technology agencies in need of a creative and digital partner.
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