Code Platoon is a nonprofit coding bootcamp in Chicago that trains veterans and military spouses through an immersive, hands-on, educational process to become professional software developers. The organization also assists graduates to  transition into civilian life, and into the workforce through a dedicated community of partners and collaborators who supply job opportunities and paid internship programs.

Before starting on any wireframes or designs, Digital Ammo spends anywhere from 2-4 weeks in what we call our “Discovery Phase”. During this phase we learned about Code Platoon on a deeper level, conducting market and competitive research, and spoke with various key players of the organization such as Rod Levy (Executive Director), Jon Young (Director of Education) and various board members to get a sense of who they are and what goals they are working toward, both with regard to the website and organization as a whole. We also uncovered pain points they were having with the current website to ensure those were addressed. This deep research and discovery phase allows us to make informed decisions about the layout of information, and overall aesthetics for the site and how they would be best received by the target audience.

After enough information was gathered, we then started the planning, site architecture, wireframing and finally the full art direction and design mockups/comps, which used their already existent color palette and logo. We were successful in producing a web design concept that was a home run on the very first try, which transitioned smoothly into building the site on the web.