School Services of California
School Services of California (SSC) tasked us with designing and developing a new website to replace their ColdFusion one. With their input, we devised and developed a Drupal website that meets both their functional and aesthetic needs. SSC and its clients came away pleased with the new website. Below are a few of the site’s features.
Custom Design
Following our standard process, we kicked things off with a few meetings to get an understanding of SSC’s needs. During the meetings, we asked SSC to share some of their favorite websites to illustrate the aesthetic they wanted. Using these sites as a guide, we created several mockups for SSC to choose from. (The image to the right is a screenshot of a mockup that didn’t make the cut.) SSC selected their favorite mockup. Then we worked through several rounds of edits to get it right.
With the mockups nailed down, we turned to developing a site to meet their needs. When we had a working site created, we did user testing to help identify and address usability issues before finalizing development. User testing picked up several items that we were able to correct.
Custom workshop management system
To help SSC facilitate their workshops, we made a custom workshop management system. The system is tailored for the nuances of SSC’s workshop model. On the frontend some of the features include: the ability to register for workshops, automatically applied discounts for logged in clients, PDF ticket generation, and automated workshop reminders sent to registered attendees. From the backend, SSC can edit registrations, run reports, scan in attendees, and much more.
Publications Migration from ColdFusion to Drupal
After we finished developing the site, we worked with SSC’s excellent developer to move the publications from the old ColdFusion site to the new Drupal site we’d created. To start the process, SSC’s developer exported all the data. Then, we wrote custom scripts to import SSC’s publications archive. The archive included decades of content in differing formats and we had do make multiple adjustments to get everything imported correctly.
Once we’d brought over the content, we customized Drupal’s user management system to limit access to SSC’s client-only publications based on the client each user is tied to. Then we integrated the site with MailChimp so that users with the correct access levels get custom emails whenever SSC adds new publications. Finally, we migrated the existing users from the ColdFusion site to the new Drupal one we created.