It’s time to get active

I’ve been swamped lately and frantically trying to stay afloat. As a result blog postings have been few and far between and I apologize. I’m still working like a fiend trying to catch up, but I think that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As our company grows we’ve managed to secure bigger and bigger clients. Earlier this year, we’ve not only signed on to work on a government project, but four. It’s been very exciting to work on large scale projects that require much more planning and strategizing.

We just completed a website for Active Communities which is an initiative delivered by the British Columbia Parks and Association (BCRPA). The goal of Active Communities is focused on supporting communities to increase physical activity levels of British Columbians by 20% by the year 2010.

When we we’re first approached by Active Communities, their biggest concern was the fact that their website was difficult to maintain and update. Having previously been designed in static html, the Active Communities team used Contribute to make updates. As more and more pages were added, the site became unmanageable. Additionally, pdfs and word documents which were linked throughout the site and found in duplicate versions all over the ever expanding number of folders. The team at Active Communities were constantly having to buy more storage space to accommodate these files.

I’ve personally never worked with Contribute, but from this limited experience, it seems to me that if a website is to grow beyond 30 pages, a more sophisticated database driven Content Management System is a better option.

By the time our strategic session, wire frame diagrams and content gathering complete, we were running out of time and I needed to get the site up and going quickly. I contemplated using Expression Engine, thinking that it might be more suitable for this project, but due to the time constraint, I opted for good old reliable WordPress. Building the site took only a few days and we were able to test and deploy quickly. This project experienced a number of bumps along the way, but I’m quite pleased with how well the site turned out, and the team at Active Communities seem to like working with WordPress.

On to the next three sites….