Hello, and welcome to our new home! I am Anna Wu, Creative Director/Managing Editor of TaiwaneseAmerican.org, and I’m the girl behind the scenes for this revamp.
It was back in June 2009 that Ho Chie and I first started talking about a new look for TaiwaneseAmerican.org. After three years of tremendous growth, we had outgrown the array of Blogger accounts that we had strung together in an elaborate network of pages. We were ready for something bigger and better. And it wasn’t just about looks. We had huge dreams about all the things our revamped site could offer the community: a more interactive gathering place; a way to centralize our social media outlets– multimedia projects, Facebook, Twitter; a more organized and streamlined way to get out information about news and events; ways to showcase the many other projects we work on; and much more. And so I set out to create just that.
Of course, these things are always easier said than done. While I happily volunteered myself to lead the redesign, I have never taken a single computer science or website design class in my life. Everything I know about websites I taught myself from building my own personal and photography websites (http://annawu.com) throughout the years. But it turns out that doing something out of passion and love is the best way to make yourself an expert on it. So armed with my self-built WordPress/css/php/html savvy and an army of friends and supporters, I trekked through each step, slowly but surely.
Hundreds of hours and several months later, it’s finally here. It feels a lot like film editing. It will never be perfect, and there are a million small things I could still change, add, or tweak. Plus, it’s so easy to drown in the technical aspects. But when I zoom out and look at the whole thing, I know it’s ready.
So this is the part where you get to take it and make it your own. Click around and see what’s new. Connect with us using the links to the right. Subscribe to our RSS feed so you always know what’s new. Buy a T-shirt to show your support. And please; if you have the means, make a donation! Because this whole revamp and ALL of the work that we all do is completely unpaid volunteer work out of sheer love. Support us!
Last but not least, I want to give a huge shout out to all the people who helped make this possible along the way: Ho Chie, for being the visionary behind everything. Grace Liang for doing picking up my slack early on– doing content editing, managing and helping to train users, and manually going through and relinking hundreds of images. Wil Chung and Dan Cheng for spending hours with me debugging and supplying their real technical knowledge when my skills (often) fell short. Liz Wang for being the best bio writer ever and for working with Grace on a lot of the content. Serena Wu, Jenny Ma, and Paul Yen for helping with graphic design. And finally, Dan Garrison and Margaret Chen for being awesome beta testers. Huge apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone! I sincerely hope you enjoy the site.
Nice job on the redesign! Looks sharp. Granted I’m viewing it on my phone right now – where’s the mobile version? (Jk)- but the UI looks vastly improved.
Thanks Vic! I’ll leave the mobile version to the professionals… So if you’re volunteering yourself, be my guest! I am more than happy to hand it over.
Aw, Anna haha I didn’t do anything. Awesome job on the revamp!