Working for Wealth: Project Overview
The Overview
Working for Wealth is a non-profit organization tackling the financial literacy gap amongst young adults by creating workshops, school curriculum, and webinars. Their CEO, Forbes Aggabao, brought me into their organization as a CTO to work on their website, structure their software development team, and continue building on my previous project for them.
The Problem
Their organization had yet to explore large-scale tech-driven solutions to financial literacy education at the time and their reach was limited to a state level. My previous project called Sprout was a skeleton example of fusing Duolingo with personal finance. The project showed some merit and could become a product if given the content and guidance.
Their website was also missing out on being responsive and having a modern design, making it less appealing and accessible to their target audience.
Both myself and Working for Wealth were respectively each other's missing piece to create a viable and scalable solution to improve personal finance education.
The Solution
Joining up with their organization provided us both with solutions to our problems with our fight to improve financial knowledge to youth. Working for Wealth possessed more connections and members to handle content creation and business-related functions to make such a product work. I had a decent enough technical background and a somewhat reliable code to start off with. The choice to work together brought everyone value.
As a new member of Working for Wealth, I started to design documentation, guides, and the codebase to scale as the organization grew. I had to essentially start their whole development team from scratch, continue developing my Sprout project, and create a better website 🤯.
As a CTO, I had to structure the codebase to be easy to share code and collaborate with developers working on different projects in the future. I also had to set up guidelines and other large-scale documentation to properly manage the various projects to work on.
With their old website, it was better to restart from the beginning and make sure the technologies would easily integrate with what was used in Sprout. The new website was made with collaboration and rapid development in mind. The new website would need to work for marketers and content writers without them needing to go in the code themselves. It would also need to a consistent design that was simple but responsive for most devices.
The Result
As part of Working for Wealth, I redesigned their website from a non-responsive site to a Jamstack empowered static site using Next.js, TailwindCSS, and Sanity. Using Next.js allowed for fast development and easy integration to Sprout which was a React SPA. TailwindCSS provided easy-to-use styling and some components from TailwindUI that were easily placed in to save time. Sanity was selected as the headless CMS because it made it easy to create custom types, preview the result, and share with non-developers to edit. The website was structured so non-developers had control over content and developers were able to quickly adapt the code to content needs.
The website structure was a highlight for me to allow lots of independence for non-developers and helped ease some pain points an organization might have over their company website. You can view the live website here or learn more about the company in the links above.