Building a website in a day for The Tukka Project

On Friday 19 June, we closed the door on our usual client work, brought the entire Zeroseven team into one room, and spent the day building a brand-new website for The Tukka Project.

The Tukka Project is a Brisbane charity making sure no kid goes hungry at school.

The morning started with Darren Playle, one of the charity's founders, telling us how The Tukka Project started and what it means to him.

The Tukka Project runs on a Kids Feeding Kids idea. High school students prepare fresh, nutritious lunch packs in their own school kitchens, designed with chefs and nutritionists, and those packs go to children who need them. The packs are handed out in plain brown paper bags, no labels and no identifiers, so a child receiving one looks no different from any other kid opening their lunch. Children eat alongside their classmates, with no stigma attached. You can read more about the work at thetukkaproject.org.

By the time Darren finished, the room was ready to go.

How an agency builds a site in a day

The discovery and design were done before the day itself, so nobody arrived deciding what the site should be. We already knew. The day was purely for building it.

What we built

The site runs on Umbraco, the open-source CMS we've built on for years. Umbraco supported the day by provisioning the environments we worked in.

On top of that, we built:

• A full set of page templates and widgets, so the Tukka team can manage and grow the site themselves without needing a developer for every change.
• A donation flow designed to make giving simple, with the aim of lifting donations so the charity can keep doing this work and reach more schools.
• A supporter portal, where Tukka's partners and supporters can log in and download what they need: protocol documents, process guides, school safety information and the like.

The Tukka Project build was something we chose to take on. We cleared the calendar for a day because the cause was worth it.

We have a long history of giving time to good causes. Our Hackathon for Homelessness with Brisbane Zero back in 2020 is worth a read if you want to see how that one came together. When a team pulls in one direction with the planning already done, a lot is possible in a short window.

The new site goes live soon. We'll have more to share when it does.