Level 7 Technology Group
order from chaos
Projects - ELAP Web Presence
Eastside Legal Assistance Program is a non-profit organization that provides, quality legal services to low-income residents of East and Northeast King County Washington.
Gathering content and suggestions from the staff, I used Microsoft Expression Web to create a new web presence. The original site was a single page created by a student office admin volunteer. The web site is hosted by Drizzle Internet in Seattle which also provides POP3/IMAP email.
The feedback we received from clients said we needed more information about the services we provide and timely updates on news and events. To that end, we created a Social media standing committee to make our presence known on Twitter, FaceBook and a Blog. I added a self-hosted blog using Wordpress. It's hosted at Drizzle on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) stack. We have a volunteer who tweets and updates Facebook and the blog.
Another suggestion from one of our volunteer attorneys,
was to provide a private section on the site to post reference
material for them to use while at the location where they conduct
the legal clinics. With that in mind, I created a private section of
the web site that required a login id and password to gain access.
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I found a solution that seems to work rather well using ASP.NET
as it supports a "membership" feature which requires a login id and
password to gain access to either the entire site or portions of it.
I won't go into the det
ails here as there are many references to it on the Microsoft Developer
asp.net web site. The login screen is shown to the right.We have basically two audiences to the secured portion
of the web site: volunteer attorneys and board members. Documents
and training materials are placed in the volunteer side while board
meeting minutes are placed in the board side. There is no overlap
between sides. The volunteer resource page is shown on the right.
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This page was created from an
aspx list view maintained by an xml file. Clicking on the "link"
will bring up a document or in this illustration launch a flash
video on adding an iCal calendar to the Outlook program.
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The last and possibly the most embarrassing oversight I made at the beginning was not emphasizing a way for a client to connect with us through our web site. Originally, a page with our phone number and a "mail to:" link seemed to be all that was needed until I realized that the folks who needed to connect with us may not have or were in a place such as a library that didn't have an email program available.
It's easy to create a forms page. Include validation using java script or the asp.net server-side controls. Getting the results to our intake person via email took a little bit longer to find the appropriate .NET Framework class that would work. More on that topic in a blog post.
For now, things are going well.