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Because Schildbach Design takes a humanist approach toward branding opposed to showing off the technological aspects of online branding, we tend to get a lot of non-profit work. The Northwest Dharma Association was one of Schildbach Design’s first clients, and we still work with them today (2008-present). The NWDA is a buddhist organization that promotes and helps Buddhist organizations in the Pacific Northwest be visible by providing listings of their organization and events. The board and leaders of their organization were very tolerant of my learning web design in the ’00’s and early ’10s. But, now I’m able to provide all of the customized services they request. And, their website is filled with customizations.

After several iterations over the past 15 years, the site has stabilized to provide a password protected member group area, an events area, a blog, and an extensive biannually Northwest Dharma News (an online magazine dedicated to Buddhism in the Pacific Northwest). A website this large and complex is not usually built by one person, usually this would be done by a team of web developers. But, non-profits are on a tight budget, so Schildbach Design took on the difficult task of creating all of these custom sections with one primary developer (me), and occationally getting help from Seattle web designer colleagues when I was not available to do the work on my own.

For those familiar with WordPress, the customizations were developing a custom theme, custom post types, custom plugins, javascript actions, and css stylesheets. This is one of those projects where there is arguably no other platform that could have been used. WordPress’ original blogging platform became something much bigger than what it originally was. It became a modular system that allowed you to duplicate the blogging UI and turn it into anything else (an events calendar, a member group, a portfolio, a shopping cart, etc…) I thank everyone at the Northwest Dharma Association for providing me with such a challenging product. It forced me to learn WordPress far, wide, and deep.

Today, my work for the Northwest Dharma Association is mostly maintenance. This is what happens after a design and user experience has stabilized. Because of the site’s complexity, there is always maintenance to be done. When WordPress, WordPress plugins, server PHP, Javascript, and other technologies are always updating, components break and need to be updated. Another ongoing job I have to do for NWDA is their Northwest Dharma News. With Steven Wilhelm as editor, I have the biannual responsibility of producing the News which involves modifying and adding to the code to create the new issues, and producing all the new articles for each issue.