Tract Association of Friends

March 15, 2011

Tract Association of FriendsThe Tract Asso­ci­a­tion is ven­er­a­ble Quak­er pub­lish­er dat­ing back to the ear­ly part of the Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry. They had a web­site but want­ed a new one built with a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that would allow for eas­i­er edit­ing. The new site is built in Word­Press. Befit­ting the orga­ni­za­tion’s ethos, the site is rel­a­tive­ly plain but there’s a lot going on under­neath the surface.

Many peo­ple use the site to print out copies of the tracts. There’s a spe­cial print stylesheet – cre­at­ed by the tem­plate design­er and cus­tomized by me – that means print-outs of these pages will be very clean and unclut­tered, per­fect for per­son­al pho­to­copy­ing. There’s the abil­i­ty to make tracts avail­able as PDFs through Scribd and there’s a inter­face in the Word­Press dash­board to allow embed­ding of these in the sidebar.

Discover Thyself / Earlham College

January 7, 2011

Discover Thyself featuring the Discern-o-Matic QuizDis­cov­er Thy­self is a “dis­cern­ment” site for Quak­er teens. Spon­sored by Earl­ham Col­lege, it fea­tures resources, videos and the all-new “Discer-o-Matic Quiz.” 

The design is all orig­i­nal. We went through six rounds of the con­cept design mock­ups made up on Adobe Fire­works. Because the site is built on Word­Press used as a CMS, Earl­ham Col­lege staff was able to add and arrange con­tent even before the design cod­ing began. The site uses the excel­lent The­mat­ic theme, a blank tem­plate that allows for quite sophis­ti­cat­ed designs using Action Hooks and com­plete CSS markup.

The most excit­ing ele­ment of the site is the “Discern-o-Matic” quiz, which takes users through a series of ques­tions. At the end the ques­tions are reor­ga­nized and pre­sent­ed to the user to help them under­stand what it is they want to do. The quiz is pow­ered using the open-source LimeSur­vey. Results are out­putted via a cus­tom PHP script that polls the LimeSur­vey data­base and out­puts in a nicely-worded and for­mat­ted Word­Press results page. The tem­plates for Lime Sur­vey were altered to mim­ick the look of the rest of the site; the aver­age user won’t notice the pass-off from Word­Press to Lime Sur­vey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, indi­vid­ual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invit­ed to share their results page via Facebook.

Vis­it Site: http://​www​.dis​cover​thy​self​.org

ReconRab​bi​.net

March 29, 2010

ReconRabbiReconRab­bi is a social net­work for rab­bis asso­ci­at­ed with the Recon­struc­tion­ist Rab­bini­cal Col­lege. It is designed to pro­vide ongo­ing edu­ca­tion and net­work­ing for far-flung alumni.
It’s a high­ly cus­tomized, member-only site built on the Ning plat­form. The typ­i­cal Ning fea­tures are here: video, pod­casts and mem­ber pro­files. Expand­ed areas include exten­sive train­ing mate­r­i­al for mem­bers. We record­ed and I edit­ed a series of eight screen­casts of approx­i­mate­ly five min­utes each for their Help sec­tion using Screen­flow for Mac; top­ics include sign­ing up, adding dis­cus­sions, using the cus­tomized train­ing material.
Member-only Site: http://​www​.reconrab​bi​.net/.

FWCC Google Maps Mashup

September 12, 2009

FWCC Google Maps MashupThe Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion unites Quak­ers of all stripes togeth­er in joint projects and dia­log. It’s Amer­i­c­as office has the most com­plete list­ing of U.S. and Cana­di­an Friends Meet­ings and Church­es and now has a map to prove it!
This is a mash-up of the FWCC data­base with Google Maps.

Because of lim­i­ta­tions of how many data points Google can show the coun­tries have been divid­ed into regions. The main access page is a screen shot of a Google Map with a old fash­ioned imagemap over­lay that allows you to select the region you want to look at. Javascript good­ness shad­ows the cur­rent­ly select­ed region.

See it live: www​.fwc​camer​i​c​as​.org/​f​r​i​e​nds

Cornerstone Fellowship

July 28, 2009

Cornerstone FellowshipCor­ner­stone is a rel­a­tive­ly new church plant in Smithville, Atlantic Coun­ty, New Jer­sey. They’re site is a sim­ple design built in Mov­able Type using off-the-shelf tem­plates to keep the bud­get down. The most excit­ing part of the site is the pod­cast ser­mons and the abil­i­ty to ask Bible ques­tions and make prayer requests from the home­page. I’m most hap­py to see the church using the site and updat­ing it regularly!

Pas­tor Fred Schwenger also has a new local con­nec­tion: he and a part­ner have just opened Supe­ri­or Auto­mo­tive here in Ham­mon­ton at 880 S White Horse Pike! 

Vis­it: Cor​ner​stone​Fel​low​shipOn​line​.com

Alliance Cemetery

July 28, 2009

Alliance CemeteryI was hired to redesign the web­site of a ceme­tery that rep­re­sents a fas­ci­nat­ing slice of South Jer­sey his­to­ry. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russ­ian pogroms, came to Amer­i­ca and start­ed a “return to the soil” move­ment that led to the estab­lish­ment of an agri­cul­tur­al colony in the small Salem Coun­ty cross­roads of Nor­ma, New Jer­sey. Before long they estab­lished Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance web­site high­lights the entrance gate. The ceme­tery has hired a sur­vey­ing com­pa­ny to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes avail­able. A detailed his­to­ry and pho­tos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is prob­a­bly the most taste­ful design of my port­fo­lio. The pages them­selves are editable by the client using Cushy­CMS and the Direc­tions page has an inte­grat­ed Google Map.

Vis­it: Alliance​Ceme​tery​.com

Haverford Friends Meeting

March 25, 2009

blankThis Quak­er meet­ing sits along Philadel­phi­a’s Main Line sub­urbs and is mak­ing spe­cial efforts at out­reach. They want­ed a design refresh that would allow the heads of com­mit­tees direct access to their sec­tion of the web­sites. With mul­ti­ple log-ins and high con­tent needs, we went with the Dru­pal con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, which has become the CMS of choice for many non-profits.

The design is built from scratch with obvi­ous nods to the Face­book look-and-feel: we want­ed some­thing that would seem both famil­iar and fresh to the young pro­fes­sion­al crowd that is this meet­ing’s most obvi­ous tar­get audi­ence.

Vis­it: Haver​ford​friendsmeet​ing​.org