Community Action of Eastern Iowa
My company, Twin State Technical Services, recently restructured Community Action’s of Eastern Iowa's website. The site is streamlined, fully responsive, and better written to appeal to their target audience: families in need, and families with small children.
The Problem
Community Action of Eastern Iowa had a lot of things in place: servers, websites, job application systems. The problem was, these systems were old, and none of them were user-friendly. Luckily, one of our employees is a playwright, and through meeting the director of CAEI in a local theatre group, was able to establish contact with the charity organization. We found a lot of outdated systems: multiple unnecessary servers running Novell Vibe, used for file sharing; a self-hosted website, with a difficult-to-use interface; old copies of productivity suites. We drew upon all three of our company’s branches to improve CAEI’s user-friendliness, both inside and out of the building.
Community Action of Eastern Iowa had a lot of things in place: servers, websites, job application systems. The problem was, these systems were old, and none of them were user-friendly. Luckily, one of our employees is a playwright, and through meeting the director of CAEI in a local theatre group, was able to establish contact with the charity organization. We found a lot of outdated systems: multiple unnecessary servers running Novell Vibe, used for file sharing; a self-hosted website, with a difficult-to-use interface; old copies of productivity suites. We drew upon all three of our company’s branches to improve CAEI’s user-friendliness, both inside and out of the building.
The Solution
We produced a beautiful, mobile-friendly, and ADA-compliant website that brought back focus to Community Action’s core constituency: families with children, and families in need. We worked in tandem with Roger Pavey and his staff to provide an easy-to-use framework for editing content (courtesy of WordPress) while they rewrote their site copy to better reflect the company’s mission.
During the development phase, we were also informed of a need for a revamped online job application. Having recently developed a webform-to-PDF online conversion system, our programmer added the necessary functionality to allow applicants to upload their own resumes and have the resulting application emailed to CAEI, while I created the form and compliant fields to allow users to fill out everything online—all on the exact same PDF document used for written applications.
The Result
The new Community Action website launched on November 21st. Previously, the site was not tracking site visitor data, so our bragging rights will have to wait until the numbers roll in. However, we CAN speak to the effectiveness of the organization’s Head Start web page. Previously, the preschool program page visits were numbering in the tens, maxing out at 34 on November 1st. After the new site launch, the number of visitors has skyrocketed into the hundreds, with a new peak of 658 users. We’re hoping to see that number climb further as more families discover Community Action for the first time.
The new Community Action website launched on November 21st. Previously, the site was not tracking site visitor data, so our bragging rights will have to wait until the numbers roll in. However, we CAN speak to the effectiveness of the organization’s Head Start web page. Previously, the preschool program page visits were numbering in the tens, maxing out at 34 on November 1st. After the new site launch, the number of visitors has skyrocketed into the hundreds, with a new peak of 658 users. We’re hoping to see that number climb further as more families discover Community Action for the first time.
