BlueHatDesign – Eugene, Oregon Web Design

MSRPO (Min­ne­sota Sea­so­nal Rec­rea­tio­nal Pro­perty Owners) Coa­li­tion speaks for rec­rea­tio­nal pro­perty owners at the State Capi­tol, see­king tax fair­ness, and grea­ter sup­port for fami­lies that own cabins, lake-shore, hun­ting shacks and sea­so­nal pro­perty in Min­ne­sota. In order to effec­ti­vely carry out this mis­sion, it is para­mount that they are able to com­mu­ni­cate effec­ti­vely with their constituents.

• They wan­ted to have the capa­bi­lity to log in and edit web con­tent from any browser.
• They nee­ded to be able to get news and infor­ma­tion that affects Min­ne­sota cabin owners published quickly and easily.
• They wan­ted to pro­vide a way for their cons­ti­tuents to write let­ters to their res­pec­tive state legislators.
• They nee­ded a way for their mem­bers to to  donate and/or pay mem­bership dues as pain­lessly as possible.
• They nee­ded a vehicle for their cons­ti­tuents to give feed­back on published artic­les and ask questions.

MSRPO Exe­cu­tive Direc­tor, Jeff Fores­ter, asked me to help them create a web site that would ful­fill these busi­ness objec­ti­ves and at the same time pro­vide a place for Min­ne­sota cabin owners to cele­brate the family tra­di­tions surroun­ding cabin life in the North Woods. Their tag line is “Cabins are where family happens.”

That’s a lot to chew on at first glance! Howe­ver, three of the five main goals were on their way to being achie­ved by set­ting up a con­tent mana­ge­ment sys­tem (CMS)/blog. Word­Press would have been my plat­form of choice, but I knew that there would be some exten­sive pro­gram­ming invol­ved in this pro­ject down the road, and since I work most com­for­tably in ASP.Net, I chose Umbraco as the CMS/blogging plat­form. Umbraco has pro­ven to be an exce­llent CMS and I defi­ni­tely recom­mend it for pro­jects that need to be built on ASP.Net.

The home page of the site incor­po­ra­tes a jQuery con­tent sli­der that dis­plays fea­tu­red con­tent. Each slide links to the rele­vant page or blog post. The left column shows a list of the most recent news items (blog posts). There is a form where users can sign up for monthly “E-mail Blasts”, and Umbraco pro­vi­des a com­prehen­sive site search feature.

I crea­ted two forms that faci­li­tate mem­bers joi­ning and rene­wing their mem­berships. We are currently eva­lua­ting con­tact rela­tionship mana­ge­ment (CRM) soft­ware to handle all of the mem­bership, dona­tion, con­tact aspects of the orga­ni­za­tion. At this time the open source pac­kage, CiviCRM is loo­king like the best candidate.

Ove­rall, this pro­ject has been a great leap for­ward for the web pre­sence of MSRPO. They have moved from a sta­tic web site with a sin­gle mem­bership form to a CMS with a robust blog sys­tem, upda­ted W3c stan­dards com­pliant design and more solid mem­bership forms. The next steps will be to inte­grate the mem­bership forms into a CRM sys­tem, and imple­ment an appli­ca­tion that will allow users to find who their state legis­la­tors are and easily write let­ters on current issues.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Case Studies, Design and Creativity, Umbraco, Web standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.