Concentric Sky, Inc.

TechStart, a non-profit organization founded by the Software Association of Oregon, launched their new website recently. TechStart’s mission is:

To promote technology education to strengthen the teamwork, critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills of K-12 students and, in so doing, awaken a passion for technology among all Oregon students.

I had the pleasure of working with President Chris Brooks and his team to develop TechStart’s new website. Working with non-profit organizations is personally gratifying; my frequent non-profit projects are one of many reasons why I love working at Concentric Sky. I’m particularly happy to work with TechStart, and hope that the next generation of students will benefit from an early introduction to math and science as much as I have. 

With their new website, TechStart sought to attract new visitors with an updated design, interactive tools, and easy-to-update content. Their previous website was not easily updated and was dimensionally constrained. TechStart wanted a new navigation scheme that allowed for secondary navigation. News and events needed to be easy to add and syndicate. The new TechStart website would also see benefit from adding web applications for contact forms and online donations. Favoring Google’s model of graphic simplicity and TechStart’s own branding guidelines, TechStart requested a new, clean graphic design that would utilize space better and integrate new tools and page types.

After much exploration, we chose Joomla 1.5 for the site. I’ve worked with Joomla before, but I learned a lot more about it during this project. As a designer, I definitely prefer Joomla to any other CMS I’ve worked with. Joomla’s default installation provides extensive UI tools for content organization, media management, and theme editing. Joomla’s development community is rather active, so finding extensions to enhance these defaults was not a problem. Installing these extensions is easy for administrators, and doesn’t even require file access - just upload the package through Joomla’s Extension Manager web interface.

It’s important that CMS programs enable our clients to easily maintain their own content; in this, Joomla earns the highest marks for empowering administrators to make changes without the assitance of a developer. In fact, I was delighted to see not only a bevvy of new content and a new navigation menu, but also a major change to how news and events were configured. These changes were completed by TechStart staff just prior to launching their own site!

Though many of Joomla’s user tools offer fine control over content, I did have a few challenges that required help from extensions. Joomla assumes that each piece of content will be displayed as a single article per page, which presents a problem for content that requires a sidebar or other special layout. Rather than ask TechStart’s team to edit HTML and assign IDs to divs in their content, I chose to install placehere, a powerful module that lets users add content, widgets, and even raw code to any area of a page. This allowed me to create a reuseable content piece for photos, sidebars, calendars, event lists, and contact forms.

Joomla also has a feature that allows the administrator to set up a contact list and includes a preconfigured contact form for each contact. Originally, TechStart’s site required a full list of contacts and a generic contact form, so I installed chrono forms, which allows users to create multiple, custom forms that can be used anywhere on the site. For news and events, I installed gCalendar, which allows users to embed a Google calendar in the site and use the calendar’s XML feed to easily build an events list for upcoming or recently added events. (The current version of the TechStart website is not utilizing this feature.)

With TechStart’s clear objectives, attractive branding and our mutual design aesthetics, we worked together to create an effective design that highlights the most important feature of any website: their text. TechStart reports that Joomla is happily handling new content and it’s clear from the changes to they’ve made to the site that they’ve quickly become quite comfortable with their new toolkit. We wish them much success!