African Diaspora United, Inc., doing business as African Diaspora United for Development (ADUD), is undertaking an organization-wide relaunch. Our public website must now communicate a significantly expanded portfolio of programs, initiatives, partnerships, publications, volunteer opportunities, and methods of support to audiences in the United States, Africa, and the wider diaspora.

ADUD already has an established website, hosting environment, WordPress content-management system, staging environment, organizational content, and brand assets. Before beginning redesign or development, however, we need an experienced website professional to independently assess the current environment and help us determine what should be retained, repaired, reorganized, replaced, improved, or deferred.

The assessment should examine the website's usability, navigation, information architecture, mobile responsiveness, accessibility, performance, technical SEO, analytics, content organization, maintainability, and apparent security or administrative risks. It should also review relevant themes, plugins, forms, integrations, backup/update practices, and the effectiveness of the site for ADUD's key audiences.

Our challenge is not simply to make the site look better. We need a clear, technically informed baseline and prioritized roadmap so that subsequent redesign and development work is focused, efficient, secure, maintainable, and aligned with ADUD's organizational growth.
This is Project 1 of 3 in ADUD’s coordinated website relaunch. It establishes the current-state assessment, priorities and relaunch roadmap that will inform Project 2 — Website UX, Information Architecture & Content Architecture — and Project 3 — Website Redesign, Improvement & Development.

The project is separately scoped, but the selected consultant will participate in limited coordination and handoff meetings with the other website volunteers.

By the end of this project, ADUD wants a comprehensive website assessment and a practical, prioritized relaunch roadmap that can serve as the blueprint for subsequent redesign and development projects.

The pro bono consultant will create:

A current-state assessment of ADUD's public website, staging environment, WordPress/CMS configuration, and major website components.
A findings summary covering usability, navigation, information architecture, mobile responsiveness, accessibility, performance, technical SEO, analytics, content organization, maintainability, and apparent security/administrative risks.
A prioritized recommendations matrix identifying what should be retained, repaired, replaced, reorganized, improved, deferred, or investigated further.
Recommended sitemap, navigation, user-journey, and content-organization improvements.
A high-level review of significant content gaps, outdated or duplicative material, and content-governance needs.
A phased website relaunch roadmap showing recommended activities, priorities, dependencies, and sequencing for future implementation work.
A final review session with ADUD leadership to present findings, answer questions, and confirm next steps.

Success means ADUD finishes the project with a documented, actionable technical and strategic baseline that can be handed directly to future UX, design, and development volunteers or contractors.

This project is assessment and planning only. It does not include coding, redesign implementation, production deployment, large-scale content rewriting or migration, penetration testing, or ongoing webmaster support.

Organization Mission

ADUD is a non-partisan, non-profit organization created to ultimately empower African diaspora communities worldwide, by engaging and partnering with individuals, businesses, agencies, and institutions in a collaborative effort to heavily contribute to the educational and social development of Africa and to build a stronger community. The vision of ADUD is to improve the partnership opportunities for our African diaspora communities, so that together we can stand strong to address the social and educational issues and lacks in Africa. ADUD staff and trained volunteers will educate, connect people to resources and encourage community collaboration addressing subtopics including but not limited to health, youth, families, welfare and community development. Our programs are developed in direct response to community need. In a global view, ADUD understands that for all of the reasons, whether it be for the pursuit of increased economic and civil stability, for increased health well-being, or if it is to embark on a new job or join a loved one, the African Diaspora target community in this 21st Century, consists of people of African origin living outside their country of origin, irrespective of their current citizenship and nationality, who are willing to contribute to the development of Africa, starting with their local community. Through our principal pillars Help, Educate, Lead, and Promote Philanthropy (H.E.L.P.), we assist our local diaspora communities by connecting people to resources here and abroad by offering specialized educational programs and projects, by offering various workshops on awareness of community needs and integration, healthy living, etc. and other educational trainings, coordinating social and professional networking events, and providing organized opportunities to give back to our local communities and our countries.