Revamping the UW Alternative Protein Group Website
The University of Waterloo (UW) Alternative Protein Group was a part of UW’s Engineers Without Borders Canada chapter. The group’s goals are to educate its peers about alternative proteins and help students find career paths in the alt protein sector.
I created a new website for the group, which played a key role in UW being accepted into the Good Food Institute’s 2022 cohort of the Alt Protein Project.
The Old Site
A student from UW created a website for the group as a class project using Ruby on Rails. The site was unfinished and the students in the group were unable to edit it.
Competitive Review
Because the group would be applying to become a GFI Alt Protein Project, we reviewed the sites of the current groups in the program. There were similarities in content and architecture, but each group had a different approach.
Website Architecture
I created an architecture for the site that we refined before moving forward. I broke the About section into two pages and included a Resources section because the group had their Career Guide for Ending Factory Farming and an alumnus hosts the Cultivating Careers in Alternative Proteins podcast. The students also wanted to include links to recipes and alternative protein options in Waterloo.
The New Site
To create the site, I used Squarespace. This makes it easy for students to update it, add to it, and make changes. Because of the pandemic, the group had not met in person yet, so we used alternative protein images and photos of UW instead of pictures of the group. I created a logo that could be replaced with the