I spent part of this past summer working for the New York State Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities. (They have quite a name.) I found the internship through Union College. The Commission is also located in Schenectady.
Their new website is live now. It has been up for a few weeks and it’s working great. They needed a website that would be especially accessible to the disabled and that they could edit themselves. The website has about 100 pages of content and automatically pulls their latest youtube videos. The menu structure and the FAQs are completely customizable.
This is the largest website I’ve ever built. The most fulfilling and exciting part of the process was seeing the system that I designed being used by their IT staff as they added their own content and edited the website to their liking. This was the first time I had had built something that I could see really working. The IT staff at the Commission were a pleasure to work with. Not only was it a nice change from building websites for family friends, but it was also alleviating to work with technically savvy people who knew what they wanted out of a website.
The website is based on Drupal 6. I chose Drupal because of how customizable it is, but it is almost too customizable. After one day of struggling with it I was ready to give up and try WordPress instead. (I love WordPress.) The more I got to know Drupal, the easier it became. In the end, Drupal wasn’t so bad; it’s not as easy and sleek as WordPress, but it is more advanced and flexible. Drupal allowed for easy page editing and organizing their large library of content.
For hosting we went with Media Temple’s Grid-Service. It was known to have had some issues in the past with reliability, but I was hoping that those problems would be fixed by now. Our Media Temple server runs Drupal just fine. The website seems fast and reliable. One of the best features of this host is that you can see how many processor cycles your website is using. Every host should have this! On the down side, Media Temple’s custom control panel is not so great. I know that they’re working on a new one, but honestly I would rather have a standard option like Plesk or even cPanel. All in all, I’m OK with the Grid, especially for $20/month.
I’m satisfied with the design of the website. One thing that I learned is how hard it is to be creative when the content that you are designing for has to be so flexible. With a content management system like Drupal, your design has to adjust to changing menu items and still look the consistent. The website is perhaps a little bland, but I hope that it was able to remain simple, easy to use, and hierarchical.
Working with the NYSCQC was a good experience. They love their new website and I learned a lot building it. I’m looking forward to hearing more feedback about the site.
