This was the first year that Birmingham hosted a satellite event for the national GiveCamp. For those who don’t know, GiveCamp is a event where developers and designers come together to donate their efforts to charity and non-profit organizations. Wanting to help the community and being located so close, we thought this was the perfect opportunity to share our skills.

The GiveCamp Birmingham was organized by Leverett Powell, and three charities participated. Spirit of Hope Youth Ranch brings children with abused pasts together with abused horses. My Father’s House takes in children who have outgrown foster care. Lastly, Innovation Depot a non-profit business incubator.

Originally we had planned to form a team with a couple of coworkers so that we could jam together. However, because of inclement weather the previous week, developer turnout was low and we had to split up. The charity we ended up working with was Spirit of Hope Youth Ranch.

The first night was used for team introductions and requirements gathering. Our team was rounded out by John Tolar who acted as Interim PM for the first night, Litepack on Google Profiles as lead designer, and Rebecca Lynn Morrow as SEO Guru.

SOHYR was represented by Joy O’Neal. She did a great job expressing what she was looking for in the new website. We spent a good deal of time discussing the site map and social integration. Joy was very well prepared with images, videos and logos to use in the design.

John Tolar turned us on to Sitefinity, a product that was generously donated by Telerik for all GiveCamp charities to use in their projects. Version 4.0 had just been released and John had experience building on previous versions of the platform. It showed strong layout and widgeting capabilities.

To round the social experience of the website, a list of missing widgets was compiled for development during the rest of the weekend. It was decided that David and I would focus on implementing these widgets. Brant would be in charge of the site layout and CSS while John would be responsible for applying that design to a Sitefinity instance. John would also contribute to the social widgets as time allowed. Rebecca would help Joy with rewording pages for SEO.

Everyone retired enthusiastically anticipating the work to come.

This post originally appeared on The DevStop.