design finch

Last week, hundreds of collegians and alumnae from my college sorority gathered in Denver for Delta Gamma’s 64th Biennial Convention and, from what I hear, they had a great time. I didn’t attend this year, but I kept up with the festivities via the official convention blog and received several excited text messages from my sorority sisters the evening the awards were announced.

The delegation representing the Austin Alumnae Chapter returned home with 4 prestigious awards, including one for the best web site out of more than 250 alumnae groups worldwide. How cool is that?! But here is the craziest part…..I designed and maintained this award-winning site for the past 3 years!

Here’s the announcement straight from the horse’s mouth:

“The Barbara Nussa Boersma Outstanding Web Site Award acknowledges the increasing and changing importance of electronic communications to the Delta Gamma experience by recognizing outstanding web sites that have been created by our alumnae and collegiate chapters…..

This year’s winning alumnae web site award goes to Austin for their terrific job integrating the Delta Gamma brand with the chapter’s personality. The highly interactive and well‐designed site offers something for everyone – whether you want to register your DG legacy with executive offices, view the online scrapbook or click on a section of town to find out who your carpool captain is for the next alumnae meeting.”

I know! I’m kind of a big deal…..and I wasn’t even there to give a proper acceptance speech!

Truth is, I had a little web design experience when I took on the webmaster role for Delta Gamma, but this was the first site I developed completely from scratch. Designing a new web site seemed like a fun challenge and a way to expand my skill set while giving a little something back to DG. In reality, it meant lots of research, nail-biting while I waited for pages to upload, and googling like crazy when things went haywire. Needless to say, I learned a lot along the way (and realized why real web developers charge so much for their services!).

A good web site is always changing and evolving, so you’re never really finished with the project. That proved difficult for the list-maker inside of me that likes to complete something and immediately check it off. But you’d better believe that now I’m adding “become an award-winning web designer” to my “to do” list and scratching it off…..just because I can!