Hopefully you’ve noticed by now that EFF has just launched a new version of our website. We’re long overdue: the last time we produced a major revision to our site was in 2010. We’d like to apologize for the delay — we’ve been pretty busy protecting your digital rights and promoting freedom online.
EFF.org is our main public interface. Its goals are pretty straightforward: we want to make our work accessible to the public (including activists, journalists, researchers, policy experts, technologists, and others), and we want to provide ways for our supporters to engage with our work (either by donating, taking action, or volunteering).
In setting out to overhaul and rethink our site, we set a few objectives:
- Make EFF’s content easier and more enjoyable to access
- Make EFF’s mission easier to understand
- Improve the donation process
- Make EFF.org responsive and usable on mobile devices
- Make EFF.org as accessible as possible to people with disabilities
- Give EFF.org a more modern, graphical, and clean aesthetic
- Increase visibility of EFF's tech work
We hope our redesign has hit the mark on each of these. (The last objective — increasing visibility of EFF’s tech work with a new Tools section — will come in a subsequent update.) Of course, we realize there are many, many issues that remain to be addressed. If you’d like to contribute your own comments or helpful tips, please send a brief note to design@eff.org.
We’d like to acknowledge the help of some donors:
- Digital Ocean donated infrastructure to help with the development process.
- Browserstack donated service to help us to ensure that EFF's work is accessible on all devices.
And some volunteers:
- Matt Cheney consulted on taxonomy and information architecture as a volunteer.
- Chris Antaki donated his time as a front-end engineer.
- Brian McNeilly helped to make EFF's site more accessible to users with visual and motor disabilities by volunteering and providing an accessibility audit.
Almost every EFF staffer made a contribution at some point, but we’d like to give particular acknowledgement to the following:
- Vivian Brown (Web Developer) shared her deep knowledge of the Drupal CMS and front end styling.
- Mark Burdett (Senior Engineer) focused on dev ops, envelope stuffing, QA and tech wrangling.
- Hugh D’Andrade (Art Director) oversaw the aesthetic vision, designs, typography and graphics.
- Lena Z. Gunn (Project Manager) is now helping plan for a future release and filing bugs. Send them in!
- Elliot Harmon (Activist) gave feedback on how to align the site to EFF's activism goals.
- Max Hunter (Engineering & Design Director) planned the project and led the team through it.
- Soraya Okuda (Designer) contributed designs, oversaw mobile versions, and made accessibility a priority for our team.
- Squiggy Rubio (Web Developer) lent her expertise in Drupal site building, provided invaluable feedback on the early designs of the site, and worked on development.
- Laura Schatzkin (Web Developer) worked on front-end coding and Drupal wrangling.
- Jon Solera (Engineering Director) provided management support toward the end of the project, and sat in on a lot of meetings so the engineers and designers didn't have to.
- Jeremy Tribby (Web Developer) contributed invaluable design vision and styling, including the inspiration for our unusual main navigation.
- Peter Woo (Software Engineer) prolifically contributed and reviewed code, put out fires, and coded the site for accessibility.
We hope you enjoy our redesign! Your support makes our work defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation possible. Please consider making a donation today!
