I have had the good fortune of working for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia for the past seven months.
When I came on board, we had finished rebranding the organization several months before. It’s a new look for a new generation of people we are reaching. In order to continue our good work well into the future, we have to be relevant to them.
J2 Design did a fantastic job of giving us a new look as well as bringing out our substance and what makes us….well….us!
The new look and feel necessitated a new website. J2 built it, and I was brought on to serve as a technical project manager and content manager to help get the project to launch. Now, I maintain it and build on it.
Built on WordPress
The Jewish Federation website is built on WordPress. Because WordPress is meant to be easily built on, we used the following plugins to add functionality (not the whole list of plugins; just the good stuff):
- The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe for the main calendar
- Ultimate Member for our user login functionality
- Gravity Forms for e-commerce form functionality and Formidable Forms for all other form functionality; each has its own strengths
- Advanced Custom Fields for all content; no hard-coding needed for non-technical people
- Yoast SEO for search engine optimization
We also used lots of custom post types for different kinds of posts around the website.
The theme is completely custom built and does not make use of a commercial theme. It was brilliantly designed and developed.
For hosting, we use WP Engine. Their managed WordPress hosting is excellent, and their customer service is solid.
The goal of the website
The goal, as I see it, is to bring people in to join us on our journey. We are a welcoming bunch and love being involved in, and facilitating, Jewish life in Greater Philadelphia. We celebrate giving, inclusion, and tradition.
If you’d like to join us, come check it out.