CAMPAIGN WEBSITE

A local school board candidate needed one place online to reach voters: who they are, what they stand for, when and where to meet them, how to vote, and easy ways to volunteer, donate or stay in touch. The site also had to work on a phone, since that is where most voters would find it, and give each voter a quick way to find their own district instead of reading a static list.

Designed and launched a responsive, multi-page site in Wix and Figma: home, meet the candidate, priorities, experience, voter info, events and contact, with a Donate button always in the navigation. Built the supporter forms (email signup, volunteer, contact, donation support) and connected them to the campaign's social channels. Gave the whole site one look: a blue, cream and orange palette with a serif heading type, so it reads as one campaign on every page. The one custom-built piece is the district lookup tool, embedded in the voter info page. For it, I researched the official boundary map, which was only available as a PDF, extracted its vector shapes into georeferenced GeoJSON, and matched an address's coordinates (from the U.S. Census Geocoder) against the five district polygons. I led the research, direction, interface design, debugging and testing, working with ChatGPT as an AI-assisted development partner, and iterated the tool through about 25 versions.

1. ADDRESS
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2. GEOCODING
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3. COORDINATES
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4. DISTRICT POLYGON MATCH
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5. SEAT RESULT

THE HARD PARTS · DISTRICT LOOKUP

• Getting usable geometry: the source was an official PDF map, not a GIS dataset, so the district shapes had to be extracted, rebuilt and georeferenced.
• Address accuracy: ZIP code or city matching is not precise enough, so the lookup uses coordinates. Edge-case addresses are a known limit, so this is not claimed to cover every address.
• Browser and service limits: cross-origin rules shaped which services were practical, and a public map tile endpoint was dropped after an access problem.
• Responsive layout: the map notice needed repeated adjustment so text stayed readable and left-aligned at every width.

1. 1Organized the site around what a voter needs to do: learn about the candidate, check how to vote, and take action, with forms and a Donate button reachable from every page.
2. 2Built the district lookup as an interactive embedded tool rather than a static info page, so each voter gets a personalized answer.
3. 3Matched on coordinates and district polygons instead of ZIP code or neighborhood, because streets next to each other can sit in different seats.
4. 4Added an outside-boundaries message so an address that falls outside all five seats gets an honest answer instead of a made-up one.
5. 5Kept the result short and added a beta note pointing people to official county resources to verify, since wrong district information could mislead voters.
6. 6Prioritized a mobile-first layout, since traffic skewed mobile and organic Facebook.

661 sessions from 506 unique visitors in the site's first period, primarily mobile and organic Facebook traffic. 21 form submissions, including 11 volunteer sign-ups. The lookup tool is a campaign aid, not an official government service, and it does not determine voter eligibility.