WordPress for Good – A Showcase of Goodness

Written by Vineeta G - September 17, 2014

At Wholegrain Digital, we believe every little positive change amounts to a greater good. Although the world we live in is still very much focused on a capitalist dogma – as they say, money makes the world go around – we have confidence that everyone would do so much better if the word ‘money’ was to be replaced by the word ‘love’.

We’re not speaking about the romantic love which serves as inspiring muse for endless songs, but the sort of compassionate one which makes an individual wake up in the morning and decide his or her medical skills are better applied in a third world country than in a well-paid position in central London. Or maybe the love a farmer feels when – tired of making a generous yet soulless profit from the meat industry – decides to turn life around by creating a petting zoo with rescued animals, bringing a smile to the face of every child in the community, not to mention granting a new lease of life to these beautiful creatures. Or every single good deed in between.

As goodness is still very much underrated, and every little platform developed to showcase positive projects is a good thing, we’ve created Wordpress for Good, a spanking new website dedicated to showcase WP websites with a soul.

THE ORIGIN

Wordpress has in its core mission to democratise publishing, and given the worldwide spread of WP hosted websites – 75 million and counting – the popular CMS makes for 20% of the entire internet and is the world’s most popular content publishing platform.
And, unlike social media ones, it’s entirely owned by us – the users – based on an ever-growing community and without a big companies’s agenda and budget behind it, so it remains independent from any outside influence which manages and controls content.

Since in many ways, this open source tool shares the same ethos as the socially-minded people described above and is made with the love of its enthusiastic community, with the belief that people need to be further educated and inspired to bring positive changes to the world, during a presentation at WordCamp, David Lockie from Pragmatic pitched a groundbreaking idea: the creation of a WordPress platform which showcases positive projects.

The concept was enthusiastically received by Tom from Wholegrain Digital, and our agency decided to take on this challenge and give it some well-designed wings.

Enter Wordpress for Good.

THE DESIGN BRIEF

We wanted WordPress for Good to look modern, clean and upbeat, and the colourway choice was based on a ray of sunshine (we definitely need more of that in London!) and the warm feeling of freedom associated with it.

To contrast with the chroma yellow, the photography – made in-house – is in black and white, stark, and unifies all projects within one single aesthetic note.
The end result is happy and bold, rays of sunshine across grey skies, very much like the projects we promote.

THE PROJECTS

I recall a casual meeting Tom and I had regarding what it means to be good.
Human Rights advocates are universally accepted as doing ‘the good work’, and for animal lovers like us there’s no doubt Animal Welfare projects would be included, but some of the ones we decided to showcase are worthy in a broader sense, a bit more abstract, and although they do not feed a hungry mouth or help a flood victim get back on their feet, they’re philosophical in nature, making us step out of a celebrity-focused culture and be embraced by great thinkers and their essays on the meaning of life and its wholesome rewards.

We’ve been recommended a few websites from their owners, and thoroughly encourage everyone to chip in, as we aspire to promote as many virtuous projects as we possibly can.

If you’d like yours to be showcased at WP for Good, drop me an e-mail at [email protected], and we’ll take it from there.
Let’s spread the goodness!