NCHE

Background

NCHE is a private, state-level organization serving homeschoolers in North Carolina. NCHE publishes a bi-monthly newsletter, runs an annual conference, and organizes a state-wide athletic conference. It is run by volunteers and a small office staff.

NCHE came to us in 2008 because they needed a redesigned website. Their primary goals were:

1. A simple, modern web design
2. A better workflow for updating content
3. Members-only features

The third requirement ended up being the most difficult, because it meant that we needed to interface with their existing member database. Because of this, we expanded the project scope to include a new administrative back-end for their office staff

New Website

The site design we put together for NCHE is simple, modern, and designed to grow. Some of the interesting features of the site are:

• The ability to join NCHE, including membership fee processing
• Donation processing
• A fast, integrated site search
• Advertising
• Homeschool Resource Guide
• Athletic Team Locator

Editable Content

Because NCHE is a volunteer-run organization, they needed an easy way to update their website content, without going through a single webmaster. Our solution was to allow all NCHE board and committee members to edit website content.

The editor is designed so that if you have permission to edit a page, you can simply go to that page, click "Edit", and make your changes. The editor works inside the exact same layout as the published page, so you can see exactly how the page is going to look.

It's very easy to link to other pages on the site, as well as new pages, external sites, email addresses, and uploaded resources such as PDFs. It's also very intuitive to insert, move, and resize images as a part of the page content. The editor also allows you to use basic heading and paragraph styles, as well as bold, italic, and underline.

Permissions for NCHE website content are managed by committee. All pages are owned by committee, and every change requires the approval of another committee member to be published. The office staff are allowed to make changes without approval.

We also keep track of previous versions of page content, for historical purposes. These are available to all NCHE staff and committee members.

Shared Files

On the administrative back-end, NCHE volunteers have the ability to upload and share files with each other. As a part of this, they can upload documents and images that can be embedded or linked to on the website. There are simple yet robust access controls in place here as well, so that while some documents are available to the public, others can be private to the NCHE board.

Member Login

Another feature of the NCHE website is that members can log in and renew their membership, or update their member information. In the future, NCHE hopes to expand this section to include more members-only resources, such as newsletter archives.

Member Database

Because the website needed access to the member database, and because the FileMaker database NCHE was using was rather limited and difficult to work with, we built a new database as a part of the administrative back-end for the website. Not only did we import all the existing membership data from FileMaker, but we simplified the design, and improved support for financial transactions.

As a part of this redesign, we added advanced search and export functionality. It is now possible to search for recently renewed members, or members that are about to expire, or members that have just joined NCHE, for a particular region or county. Any of these searches can be easily exported as an email list, or as a CSV file which can be used for mail-merge.

Email Newsletter

NCHE had been using Dada Mail to send HTML emails to all of their members. Their workflow required several people to be involved, in multi-day process to send out an email. NCHE asked us if there was a way for the email newsletter to be as simple and easy-to-use as the website editing feature. We designed a similar editor for emails, with the ability to save drafts, send a test email, and finally to email all the active members. It also automatically supports including images from the shared resources.

Committees and Board Members

In order for the permissions to work correctly, the website needed to also manage the current members of all the NCHE committees and board positions. We made this as simple as possible, even making it automatically switch board members in and out as their terms respectively begin and end.

Email Aliases

The old NCHE site hosted a number of email lists and aliases for various nche.com addresses. We built a feature to make those addresses easier to manage. Certain aliases, such as board members and committees were tied directly to those parts of the database, so that they would no longer have to be updated by hand. We also installed high quality spam filtering software on the server to cut down on the amount of spam NCHE volunteers were receiving.

Other Features

The back-end also includes the ability to manage sports programs for the NCHE Athletic Conference team locator, advertisement management, a membership graph, a record of search queries, user management, redirect management, region management, navigation management, and deposit reporting.

Server

We set up a new account for NCHE at slicehost.com, to give them quality hosting at a reasonable price. We took care of all the server setup and installation, as well as importing the initial data to get the website up and running.