As you can see, we've launched a brand new website. We've been working on this project for the past year and are excited to show you what's new, what's still coming as it relates to features, and why we made the update.

The NeighborLink website is always in development with the goal of creating a technological tool that empowers our users to seek assistance and to find ways to help. We've never stopped investing time and resources into the website for the 13 years we've been around. We don't plan on stopping either. As long as our user base continues to grow and provide feedback on what's working and what isn't, we'll continue to respond to the needs of our customers. First and foremost, we're a technology company with a heart for connecting neighbors who can love one another through practical acts of kindness and transformation.

What's New?

It's easy to see that it looks completely different thanks to our partners at One Lucky Guitar, a design boutique here in Fort Wayne. For the past eight years, we've just been building on the previous designs and layouts as we had resources to do so. We felt like we need to hire a firm that could help us take a step back and truly reevaluate whether were heading in the right direction. Website design is more than pretty pictures, clean typography, or bright colors. The next time you go to your favorite website, think about why you like it. Chances are you love the way it helps you solve the problems you set out to solve by going to it, or it provided the right amount of information/entertainment to keep you engaged. That's what OLG did with us. We believe the new visual layout combines the problem solving navigation that our existing volunteers desire from us, and the right amount of engaging content that easily informs new visitors what we actually do.

Have you ever heard the term, responsive? It's a fancy term that describes the reality that our website now moves and adjusts no matter how big your web browser is. It also means that if you access the website on a tablet or smart phone, it will give you a version designed just for those devices. This is a huge improvement over our past website which just gave you a copy of the main website. With more and more project posters and volunteers using their mobile devices to access NLFW.org, we had to update in this way. We launched an mobile device app last year, which works great, but it's just too costly for us to develop and maintain both a website and app, especially when we can develop a website that works great on a phone. We'll still be working on the mobile apps, just not as high of a priority. Take a moment and pull up our website on a mobile phone and see what we mean.

In addition to what you can visually see on the website, there are dozens of internal improvements to donation pages, navigation adjustments, website stabilization, and the way we use the website to tell the story of what our organization is actually doing. Give the maps, project search function, or re-access your dashboard again soon to see some of those things.

What's Coming?

This is technically Phase 1 of 2 in the redesign. We will be moving forward with re-designing all the websites subpages. For instance, the tools, videos, and stats pages will get specific page designs that better present the data on those pages. Also, we'll be reevaluating the actual project page in order to make sure the page quickly presents the data a volunteer needs and the project management data needed. In addition the individual project page, the project search features will adapt. We've got a lot of user feedback we'll be using to shape this page. So, expect more features in 2017 to be rolled out.

If you come across any issues or want to provide some additional feedback, we're always open to receiving it. Without that feedback, we won't know as much as we could to shape our development decisions. Feedback is important. Email it to Website Feedback and we'll let you know we received it.