National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants Website
The National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants (NAHAC – just say “knack”) was struggling to upgrade its website. They had worked with a designer to advance the project but the obstacles they confronted were mostly technical. Their site was hosted on the WildApricot platform, a Swiss army knife of integrated solutions for small non profits. This platform included member management, email as well as a website tool. Having not been proactive, they found themselves several technology upgrade generations behind on their web presence. Besides not providing a mobile friendly web presence, the site was displaying as a sub-domain of the host (nahac.wildapricot.com). When we were engaged they were also approaching their bi-annual conference and needed the new site to be completed quickly.
The Strategy
Our
team confronted a rescue project with an imminent launch deadline.
Moreover, the site was built on a platform with which we had no
familiarity. As a first step we conducted a billable audit with the
agreement that if we elected to not go forward there would be no charge
to the client
Our
biggest challenge was that the WildApricot platform did not have any
capacity for developing the upgraded the site in a non-public stage
environment. That is, changes could only be made on the live site, an
untenable solution for a major site overhaul that needed client review
and approval before publishing.
We
worked with WildApricot to create a temporary site into which we copied
the existing site although it only included a partial feature set.
Given the design constraints of the WildApricot platform, our design
team selected a suitable theme which was customized with the client’s
visual brand and imagery we selected together with imagery from their
library. Once we had client approval of the upgraded design, we then
duplicated the design implementation on the live site, a less than ideal
situation which we compared to working “without a net.” But we
prevailed.
Once
the upgraded design was implemented, we then addressed some of the
technical issues which included placing the entire site within the
organization’s domain (nahac.com/xxxxx), improving the member search
facility, upgrading the podcast player to be compatible with mobile
browsers (not Flash) and insuring that the extensive library of podcasts
would continue to be accessible.
Launch
Although
the unanticipated obstacles added out-of-scope costs to the project, in
the end the website was launched before the conference and functions
securely and without flaws on both mobile and desktop.