In the world of web design launching just one website a month is a feel good accomplishment. On Monday November 10th Page Design was fortunate enough to launch not one, but two websites in a single day. It's a satisfying moment when you finally have the "okay" to push the upload button and see the fruits of your labor come to pass.
California Association of Health Plans (CAHP) www.calhealthplans.org is an association that represents California health care insurance providers. Their website is ever-growing and CAHP wanted the ability to maintain it themselves using Adobe Contribute. Adobe Contribute is an easy-to-use web authoring tool that allows CAHP to make text updates to existing templates and create new pages from a set of predefined templates. Many clients including CAHP enjoy this approach because it's interface is similar to other office products that they use on a daily basis. This removes the barrier to learning the software, keeping it's learning curve very low and very affordable.
In addition to making the site easy for CAHP to maintain through the use of templates, Page Design also added some additional progressive enhancements. Using additional server technologies like ASP and ColdFusion Page Design was able to unify common elements like navigation systems, footers, and special notices. This becomes important when a static website has a great many pages, but it must also have the ability to update critical information quickly and globally.
Although it may not be obvious at first, the CAHP website is fairly large. Thanks to good organization and simple but effective design principals, Page Design was able to break the site into many smaller more manageable (friendlier) chunks. Since the site will continue to grow exponentially over the next year and beyond, the information architecture had to be crafted to allow for this growth. The old site made use of PDF's extensively for much of it's content. The new site will still offer PDF downloads, however all new articles will now default to an HTML version first, with an option to download the PDF's separately. This approach offers an overall better user experience, while bringing it into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)—Something we are quite proud of.
Also launched the same day is de la Peña & McDonald www.dlpmcd.com. de la Peña & McDonald is a law office based in San Francisco. Their site is a much smaller brochure-style site, but significant all the same. What is great about de la Peña & McDonald is that Page Design also created their branding and identity so over all there is no disconnect between looking at printed materials and the website. All the design has been kept consistent further enforcing brand identity to a visitor to the site.
Monday's launch of de la Peña & McDonald was more of a "soft launch" That's a term we use to describe a site that is nearly complete, but may be missing a few pages or components. Frequently this is done to meet an event or some other occasion where the site needs to be debuted. Missing from this "soft launch" are some other really useful client features. Items like a WebEX login from the homepage and a file upload system similar to the one used by us here at Page Design. This is a great alternative for those that require file uploads, but hate the complexity of FTP software. Having a file upload system removes the burden of having to use software specifically developed for FTP. FTP is as old as the internet it's self, but it's far too confusing for many people so a simple upload system is much more comfortable and familiar approach. It's a win-win for all.
In closing, We are very happy to have launched not one, but two websites in a single day. We are even happier to have California Association of Health Plans and de la Peña & McDonald as clients and hope they enjoy using their new websites as much as we enjoyed creating them.
