Recently I have been putting in volunteer hours for Special Olympics Alberta. When I lived in Nova Scotia, I had volunteered several times for Special Olympics Nova Scotia, usually just Day Of kind of volunteering such as setting up tents, being a linesman for soccer, or providing lunches to the athletes.

I can’t say enough how much organizations like these make an impact by making sport accessible for everyone. The camaraderie between the athletes is inspiring.

I had a friend reach out to me to see if I would be interested in managing the 2019 Special Olympics Alberta Winter Games website. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to give back to an organization I admire.

The organizers asked me to build a website for the Winter Games, with a more streamlined look and feel compared to the original site they had been using, which was Drupal-based. The original site had too many links and menus which made navigating the website pretty confusing.

I agreed to build them a new website and guided them through securing hosting, a domain name, and then setting them up with a WordPress site, using the Sporty theme by Template Express. I used a lot of custom CSS within the theme and custom HTML in a few of the widgets to give the website a look that they are happy with.

The Support page before and after images are an example of the difference in design between the original website and the WordPress site I built.