Roddenberry Foundation

The Roddenberry Foundation is a US non-for profit organisation that supports civil rights and climate change projects and activists across the world, set up Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek.

Multi-website migration

We worked closely with the Roddenberry Foundation to migrate four websites, three of which were non-WordPress, into a single WordPress environment. This means that the Foundation staff can now login in one place to update information about their Catalyst, Prize and Fellowship programs.

We migrated three legacy websites into one WordPress site.

The migration included:

• Establishing our client on premium WordPress hosting
• Combining branding and information architecture to smoothly merge the four sites into one
• Creating development and staging websites to smoothly transition to the new site
• Carefully assuring that no traffic was lost, and that no dead links were left behind

Design and frontend development

Each original website had some complex design elements which stretched the capability of our preferred WordPress theme, Beaver Builder, but it also allowed us to showcase some of its lesser used features. We implemented custom features such as these animated FAQ sections which appear on the Prize and Fellowship pages.

A custom FAQ module on the Roddenberry Foundation website.

Structured data

As part of this project we analysed the structure of information shown on the Roddenberry Foundation’s website and discovered areas where structured data could be used to more simply display pages for Fellows and Judges. WordPress’s Advanced Custom Fields allows the Foundation to update information via a backend form. The frontend pages are then created automatically from that data.

Roddenberry Foundation judges page, generated from backend data.

Speedy results

This project was completed in just four weeks, before Christmas 2018. Although our client was remote (based in the US), we collaborated closely via shared documents, online chat, and regular video conferences to meet the tight deadline.

Ongoing work

Flax Digital continues to work with the Roddenberry foundation on website and IT projects.